A few touch ups and fixes went up today for Reports that are worth noting. Most important is a change to the way checkboxes are now graphed. In the past, if you were given a checkbox as shown in the image to the right, the graph would be labeled based on the first choice, rather than the question. So in this example, you would select “Red” in the report builder to graph all of the checkboxes related to that question. This was a bug and while graphs could still be created, it was definitely confusing. That’s all behind us now because we fixed it so that you can select the title of the checkbox when adding graphs to your report. In this case, “What is your favorite color?” Much better.

The only tricky part is for those of you who may have selected the second or third choice like “Blue” or “Green” in the past. The graphs will still draw properly; however, when editing the report a re-selection will need to be made in some cases. In addition to that change, a few bug fixes have gone up as well:

• Most HTML in field titles will no longer break the report creation process.
• Graphs now properly display even when there are multiple conditions referencing the same field.
• Adjacent checkboxes can now all be graphed. Prior to this, only the first could be graphed.
• Multiple fixes to the process of duplicating a report.

Query API

Why stop at reports? The Query API could use some beefing up too. Here are some of the enhancements we have made:

• Data can now be returned in both JSON and XML formats
• All parameters are now functioning properly when accessed from an outside URL
• See an example in action or read about how it was created.

Default values for date, european date, and country went up this morning. To set a default country, just edit your address field and select the country from the list on the left. For the date fields, both dates and implied words are valid. For example, the following values will work:

• 2/15/2007
• today
• tomorrow
• +3 days
• last thursday

The nice part about the words is that they change dynamically. So, if you would like the default value of your date to always be the current date, just write “today” in the default value.

We’ve also managed to fix something that has been bugging us for quite some time — scrolling the page on submission. In the past, if you were to embed a long form on your site, your users would see a blank space after clicking submit. This happened because the form was so long, and the confirmation message was all the way at the top. We have now changed it so that when a user presses submit, they will jump to the top of the form if there is no Redirect URL set. This means if there were errors, they will see the notification, and if not then they will properly see the confirmation message.

We have gradually been preparing Wufoo for international support, so we’re happy that timezones are now functioning. To make use of timezones, go to your Account tab when logged in, and select your timezone from the drop down menu. Once you save, the new timezone will be reflected in the Entry Manager, reports, RSS, and exports.

We have also prepared the backend for foreign languages on public forms. The Wufoo interface will remain in English, but all of your users visiting your forms will be able to see the system messages in a language of your choice. While we were able to get the code in place, we are unfortunately not able to translate English into any other languages, so we we need your help. We would love for all of you multilingual users out there to lend us a helping hand by translating the strings found in this document. Just send an email to support@wufoo.com with the translation and the language being used. As we gather language sets, we will update the document to let you all know which are complete. Thanks!

Report Themes!

While Wufoo does a great job helping you style and personalize the way you collect data thanks to our really great Theme Builder, we felt that our reporting system was in need of the same serious love. Reports like to dress up too, you know. And so we’re really pumped to announce that you can now apply custom themes to your Wufoo reports.

One of the great things we’ve done here with themes for reports is that you can apply the exact same themes you created to style your Wufoo forms to your Wufoo reports. This way you can easily coordinate your Wufoo input and output without having to duplicate any work. Applying a theme to a report is done in the exact same way as applying a theme to a form. Just go to the Report Manager and click on the drop down of available themes.

We want you to know that this is only the first stage. Currently, the only properties that carry over for your theme is the background, logo/header, and the typography for the report’s title and description. We’re hoping to allow for a lot more customization in the future, now that the foundation has been laid. Anyway, we love the changes that we’ve made and hope you do too. Now, go out there and show off your sexy data.

As Ryan stated before when we released our query and report API, “simplicity comes at a price – lack of power”. We would love to add every feature you could desire, but due to time and usability constraints, that just isn’t a possibility. So, for users who love using Wufoo, but are looking for a little more customization on how their forms operate, and how data is submitted, we bring you the submit API.

The submit API will allow you to programmatically submit data into your Wufoo account without requiring your user to visit a form that is hosted on Wufoo’s servers. We will continue to validate all form data before it is submitted into your database, but you’re free to manipulate the data before and after it is submitted to Wufoo. Here are a few examples of what could be achieved with the submit API:

• Redirect users to different locations depending on how they filled out the form.
• Add forms to your website without the use of iFrames.
• Email users customized messages based off of form data.
• Create widgets or customized applications that can submit data into Wufoo.
• Add up the values of two fields before submitting to Wufoo.
• Hook Wufoo up to your payment gateway.

To learn about how the submit API works, please head over to our API documentation section.

One Entry Per User

We’re happy to announce that there is now a simple, yet useful feature available to all Wufoo users. All forms now have the option to accept only one submission per IP address. This is particularly useful for poll-type forms where you only want to allow one vote per person. To enable this feature, just edit your form and click on the “Form Properties” tab. From there, you can choose to “allow only one entry per user” with a simple click. IP addresses will only be logged on public forms, so you can still update and create new entries on the admin side at will.