We have released version 1.7.4 of FormsAssistant. As usual, to upgrade to the latest version, download it from our download page and reinstall it over your current installation.
This version addresses two different issues:
- Remove an error caused when entering very long values (greater than 255 characters).
- Adds an option to ‘Process unchanged fields‘.
The history of a bug report
Last week we received a support message that informed us that FormsAssistant would cause an error if any of the values on a form was too long. That error would cause that the rest of the values were not processed.
As it turned out, the problem was caused by Word not accepting long strings (i.e. strings with more than 255 characters) as the parameter for the Find and Replace function.
This limitation also occurs when using find and replace manually.
The solution is simple, rather than using always find and replace, FormsAssistant first checks whether the entered value is a long value. If it isn’t, it uses the old method, otherwise it performs a manual (and potentially much slower) manual replace.
While implementing the new functionality, I realized that the ‘Process’ procedure used by FormsAssistant replaced all fields, even those that had not been changed.
Considering that this was a bag programming practice, and remembering my recent discussions about re-processing forms and optional fields, I decided to stop processing fields that had not been edited by the user.
Turning a bug into a feature
Anyone that has been involved in software development knows that users of our programs are usually more savvy that ourselves, and that they use our products in ways that we had not even thought of.
As it turns out, this was the case with the user that pointed out the string too long error.
He had noticed that FormsAssistant replaced fields with Comments when they were not filled in, and used that bad programming practice as a feature of the software. Therefore, he uses Comments to place default values on his forms. Brilliant!
For sheer luck, I had never noticed what was happening because we don’t usually use Comments on our own forms, and therefore had never noticed what would happen if a field with a comment was not edited.
In any event, on the new release with the new option added, we have the best of both worlds:
- Users that want to use Comments as a convenient way of having default values, should check the ‘Process unchanged fields’ option.
- Users that want to process a form multiple times, leaving unprocessed fields intact each time, should uncheck the option.
