coldfusionJedi

I'm happy to announce the release, well, the beta release, of the 3rd version of Soundings, my ColdFusion-based survey application. You can download it now from SVN (http://svn.riaforge.org/soundings). My plan is to let folks test it out and if things work well, issue a formal release next week. Be sure to read the release notes and note that the docs have not yet been updated. So with that being said, what's new, and how can you test it?

The first change is to the security system. The administrator now has two kinds of users - administrators and survey creators. As you can guess, survey creators just have the ability to work with surveys and questions. All surveys they create belong to them and they can't see surveys belong to other users. This means the administrator can set up accounts for various users and let them create their own surveys.

You can now create templates. Templates are simply a header and footer. Surveys can chose to use a template. This means you won't see the lovely blue skin wrapping your survey. It also means multiple people at one organization can skin their survey as they see fit. Along with this, surveys can also be hidden from the main list of public surveys on the non-protected web page.

Surveys can be embedded on a web page. I hope this works. It seems to. Here is an example:

Reporting has been updated. The main update here is the addition of date filters. For a busy survey this lets you generate quicker results by limiting the amount of days checked. I also fixed a few small bugs in the same area as well.

A few notes. I have not run VarScoper on the code yet. I ran into a few missing var statements while working for v3, so I plan on doing a formal check right before the final release. Secondly, if you want to test Soundings v3, I'll be happy to give you an account on the demo install here. Just shoot me an email via the contact form. I will not promise the demo version will stay up forever, but I hope to have an alternative that is a bit more permanent early next year.

I just released Soundings 2.1 to RIAForge. This is mainly just a bug fix release, although it has some nice user submitted UI improvements, including visually marking required survey items. Soundings also marks the first application of mine where I ripped out cflogon. A subtle issue with it (see below) caused two clients in the past week to have issues.

So the issue isn't a bug per se, but a feature that trips me up all the time. ColdFusion's roles based security will automatically tie in to web server security. Now imagine you want to see if someone is logged in. You do this by checking getAuthUser(). (ColdFusion 8 added isLoggedIn(), but Soundings has to work in older version.) Now imagine someone deploys Soundings on an Intranet where HTTP auth is in place.

All of a sudden getAuthUser will return a value and that application will think that a user is logged on to Soundings, where in reality it was just someone logged into the web server's security system.

There is no way to say "I don't care about the web server, I have my own security model." That to me makes cflogon something I just can't use. In other applications I get around this by using a session variable so I can tell that someone has logged into my application.

To be honest, this issue probably only trips up people like myself - who write applications to be used by others - but as it hit two people in one week I figured it was just time to dump it.

During lunch I released a quick update to Soundings. A user (thanks Emmet!) found a pretty serious bug with CSV export. Turns out I wasn't stripping HTML data from survey data. Wow, that's really dumb. Like I was channeling Paris Hilton while coding dumb.

I've added code to strip the HTML both in input, and in the Excel output (for those who may have old surveys with bad HTML in it).

A few other small bugs were corrected as well.

It's very late and I'm very tired, so hopefully I didn't miss anything obvious, but I'm happy to announce the release of Soundings 2.0. Soundings is a ColdFusion Survey application. New features include:

• Pagination. Now if you have a 75 question survey (yes, people did this with Soundings), you won't have 75 pages to go through. Currently the number of questions per survey is globa, but 2.1 will enable you to change this per survey.
• Reports can now hide questions. So if your survey has 10 questions, but the first 5 are biographical, you can hide them. I also added PDF as an option for reports.
• New logo by Alex McKinney and new admin UI by John Ramon. The front end UI is still rather simple because my assumption is still that folks would want the survey in their own UI.
• User system. Instead of just a password, the system now uses users and passwords. Currently all users have the same rights in the admin. Note to MS Access users: Stop using Access. Seriously. Anyway, if you do use Access, the users table is not in the database. If someone wants to add the table and send me the MDB back, it would be appreciated. Be sure to populate it with the default data.
• Soundings is a very old application. In 2.1 I may rip out some of my old code just because it is pretty far away from how I code now. Keep that in mind if you look at the code base.

So what's with the "Shock the Monkey"? It is my battle cry. If you are a ColdFusion site and you resort to SurveyMonkey, shame on you. (Ok, maybe not shame, but I'm wagging my finger at you!) If you feel like Soundings ain't quite there yet - let me know.

Ok, thats it for tonight. Tonight's build was brought to you by Thriftshop XL - my new mashup favorite. Now that Soundings 2 is out the door, I'll be starting work on Galleon 2. Sometime in there I'll get BlogCFC 5.9 done, and than when Galleon 2 is done, BlogCFC 6 will truly begin.

A few days ago I released a preview update for Soundings 2. This update focused on new pagination features for surveys. Today I'm releasing an update with the following changes:

• Updated handlers for Text Box questions. They now support pagination.
• Reports can now be generated in PDF.
• Reports can now have a question filter applied. This is useful for cases where your report may have a bunch of questions about the responder that aren't really relevant to the report itself.

As mentioned in the last entry, Soundings really needs a bit of UI loving, so if someone wants to help clean up the HTML a bit, please let me know.

I'm also looking for a Soundings logo, something on par with the BlogCFC logo. I can't offer much in the way of money (ok, I can't offer any money), but think of the fame you will get!

As a side note - I forgot to mention. Soundings now makes use of Spry. The question filter for reporting is AJAX based. It isn't a terribly sexy use of AJAX, but it works.

I've got a preview of Soundings 2 available for folks who want to test. This release just adds one feature - multiple questions per page. You can't set the number of questions per survey - it is a global Application setting. It only works for true/false and yes/no questions. If you use any other type of question, it will not work. I'm looking for:

• Confirmation that the pagination works
• Some feedback on the UI in regards to how errors are displayed. Right now you get a bold message above the question, but I'd like to see if this could be improved
• Actually, I'd like suggestions, or just the cleaned up HTML, for ways to make the questions look a bit better now that they are on the same page

What else will ship in 2.0? You will be able to set the number of questions per survey, with the application setting being the default. Bug fixes for surveys with deleted questions. And a real good idea for my biggest Soundings tester - you will have the option to remove questions from reports. This means if your 10 question report has 3 questions about personal info, you can remove this from the report and focus on the questions that are important.

Anyway, the zip is attached to this entry.

For folks who may not know what Soundings is - it is a simple ColdFusion based survey application. Like SurveyMonkey, just cooler because. Um. Because it's ColdFusion. There ya go.

Version 1.5.2 was released today. Changes are listed below:

• There was a pretty bad bug that cropped up if you deleted a question and didn't "fix" the ranks by making sure they were no missing numbers. This should be corrected now.
• John Paul Ashenfelter provided some CSS fixes that helps remove some of my ugly HTML (pardon me, I'm an old schooler ;) and makes things a bit cleaner. I think it still has work to do, but it's better. Thanks John!
• The title of the survey now displays on each page. This was an obvious and dumb thing for me to forget. Thanks go to a user who pointed it out. (I forget who.)
• Matrix questions weren't correctly showing the right selected cells if you went backwards in the survey. Thanks go to a user who pointed it out. (I forget who.)

As always, you can download Soundings from the project page. This time I will mention my wishlist, but only because I made a decision on XM over Sirius (that should spawn a few hundred comments). Just in case someone is feeling extra generous. ;)

I've released an update to Soundings today. Soundings is my ColdFusion survey application. It lets you create surveys and gather results. You can generate reports on these surveys as well.

The update has more bug fixes on the tableprefix feature. Nathan, I hope your happy. ;) I want to give big thanks to Ryan Heldt. He sent me a nice list of the tableprefix bugs along with actual line numbers. This made it super easy to update the code base.

So why did I update the version number? I actually added a feature. A request came in a week or so ago that made such perfect sense I'm not sure why I never had it in the first place. You can now clear the results of a survey. This lets you build the survey, test it, and then clear the results before going live.

As always, you can download the code from the project page.

p.s. Hey Scott, look, I didn't mention my wishlist once! Oops...

Woohoo! Another bug related to the tableprefix feature. I'm thinking of my friend know who suggested now and sending evil thoughts to him. ;) Anyway, the project page has been updated with the new build and zip number. Also, someone just sent in a nice little idea. The idea was to allow a 'clear results' type function. That way you can play with your survey and when ready to go live, easily remove all the test submissions. I'll try to get that in next week.

Here is a crazy question. Who thinks my applications need a logo?

Edited: I forgot to mention. Today's build is brought to you by Fatboy Slim.

A very minor update was released for Soundings today. It corrects an issue created with the new tableprefix feature.

Updated: Another bug was found and fixed. New version is 1.5.002.