Hey Chad and other DS folks,

I read over your reply to my earlier frustrations with the asterix issue and I've finally just abandoned the idea of client side validation. Adding HTML to the label is a good stop gap, but then I can barely make out the question names when I'm creating / managing the forms which I can only becomes a real nightmare for forms with 100+fields.

Tables seem to be at the crux of all my problems right now because it seems that IE and FF just don't jibe when it comes to their method of rendering tables when you don't specify specific widths. Particularly, with a 960px wide skin and a 2column (really 4 counting labels) form, the labels wind up 2-3inches away from their fields, and just saying "Make all labels right-aligned" doesn't work because it effects the custom HTML sections and buggers up their alignment as well.

Are there any plans to make styling / layout a bit more controllable? Just some ability to define widths for TDs may help. From a coder's perspective, the functionality of the module is fantastic but I wind up dealing a lot more with my clients complaining about the look and layout of the forms.

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback. We are always trying to help improve the look and layout of the forms, and features requests/comments from users are a driving force behind these enhancements. Actually this is why there are features such as 'Add to same row as previous question, 'label and field same column, 'pop up help text', 'example text', 'question headers and footers', ' column spanning', 'row spanning', etc... Additionally, each and every field type and label can have its own stylesheet class, and each table cell has its own styelsheet class as well.

You also have access to the main tables stylesheet class. I am wondering in your case if you just changed the main questions table to have a fixed width instead of a relative width (I think the default stylesheet class for the Dynamic Forms main table is set to 100%) would fix up your forms spacing issue between fields? Other options would be to use a text/html field to the right that basically has a blank table in it to push the fields further to the left as well.

Additionally, are you making use of colspan and rowspan properties? That might help as well. You might also check out this demonstration which also outlines Dynamic Forms Stylesheet Properties.

We will always continue to research ways of enhancing the look and feel of forms though, we use tables and TDS instead of DIVS because they work with the DNN Core more, you will find this using any of the top skinning developers as well for DNN.

-Chad