Alpaca Release 1.1.3

The Alpaca project team is pleased to announce the release of Alpaca 1.1.3.

What is Alpaca?

Alpaca is a JavaScript plugin that makes it easy to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a core engine and a control library to let you change form layouts, plug in validation logic and adjust form presentation with simple changes to JSON.

Alpaca is the web forms engine for Cloud CMS. It can be used within your own standalone projects. It is free to use without restriction within both non-commercial and commerical applications.

Download

To download the latest release of Alpaca, visit http://www.alpacajs.org. We make available distributions with all of the source code and examples.

Or you can visit our GitHub project, pull the source and build it yourself:
https://github.com/gitana/alpaca

What's New?

This release introduces some bug fixes, new features and a new control field.

• Added the CurrencyField control to provide currency input format and syntax
• Fixes to TypeAhead support on TextField with additional examples of remote data loading
• Added options-defined postRender callback on items within ArrayField after rendering
• Added I18N support for Polish (locale pl_PL)
• Added support for Ruby on Rails attribute convention on form post
• Updated copies of all web libraries to the latest releases (grab yours from /lib directory)

Special Thanks

This release features a number of community driven improvements as well as pull requests contributed from @DSoa, @yaworsk, @tperrysov and @sebast26.

Thanks to everyone involved for all of their hard work.
Muchas gracias por todo!

Coming Soon - 1.5.0

Concurrent with this release, we will be offering a preview of the Alpaca 1.5.0 release. The Alpaca 1.5.0 release is a major refactoring with a number of improvements, including Handlebars support, separate template files and a 3x performance improvement. The 1.5.0 release will be the next release of Alpaca.

Download and Contribute

We encourage everyone to download and try out the 1.1.3 release. For all active projects, we encourage developers to upgrade to the 1.1.3 release for all the latest bug fixes and updates.

For code-level information on what has changed, please check the commit log.

Alpaca is a community-led project and benefits greatly from community code fixes, patches, issues and feedback. Want to add a feature? Found a bug? Feel free to fork the code and submit a pull-request. Or submit an issue and ask the community what they think. We're building Alpaca for you and would love to have your contributions.

Alpaca Release 1.1.2

The Alpaca project team is pleased to announce the release of Alpaca 1.1.2.

What is Alpaca?

Alpaca is a JavaScript plugin that makes it easy to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a core engine and a control library to let you change form layouts, plug in validation logic and adjust form presentation with simple changes to JSON.

Alpaca is the web forms engine for Cloud CMS. It can be used within your own standalone projects. It is free to use without restriction within both non-commercial and commerical applications.

Download

To download the latest release of Alpaca, visit http://www.alpacajs.org. We make available distributions with all of the source code and examples.

Or you can visit our GitHub project, pull the source and build it yourself:
https://github.com/gitana/alpaca

What's New?

This release introduces several new features and bug fixes.

• Better asynchronous support for deeply nested rendering chains
• Enhanced conditional dependency checking can now reference any level in the tree using the schema.id property
• Faster dependency checking and validation logic
• Improved support for JSON Schema v4
• Added new UploadField for multi-file uploads (drag and drop)
• ACE Editor field now respects ACE annotations with validation check
• Improved ACE Editor auto sizing
• Support for the latest Twitter typeahead plugin
• Textarea supports placeholder attributes
• Checkbox field now supports multiple values
• Improved support for Bootstrap 3
• Inline layouts using jQuery selectors
• Added new schema property removeDefaultNone which will prevent the addition of 'None' to select boxes when required is set to false
• Updated the List Field to allow object rows to be provided as an array (as well as object) to preserve insertion order.
• Allow for forced non-UMD mode with root/window override
• More examples of custom validation, deeply nested forms, and JSON schema reference loading
• Additional caching for JSON schema loading to improve performance
• Lots of bug fixes and improvements

Special Thanks

This release features a number of community driven improvements as well as pull requests contributed from @Kirosoft, @1337 and @yaworsk.

Thanks to everyone involved for all of their hard work.

Download and Contribute

We encourage everyone to download and try out the 1.1.2 release. For all active projects, we encourage developers to upgrade to the 1.1.2 release for all the latest bug fixes and updates.

For code-level information on what has changed, please check the commit log.

Alpaca is a community-led project and benefits greatly from community code fixes, patches, issues and feedback. Want to add a feature? Found a bug? Feel free to fork the code and submit a pull-request. Or submit an issue and ask the community what they think. We're building Alpaca for you and would love to have your contributions.

Alpaca Release 1.1.1

The Alpaca project team is pleased to announce the release of Alpaca 1.1.1.

What is Alpaca?

Alpaca is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a core engine and a control library to let you change form layouts, plug in validation logic and adjust form presentation with simple changes to JSON.

Alpaca is the web forms engine for Cloud CMS. It can be used within your own standalone projects. It is free to use without restriction within both non-commercial and commerical applications.

Download

To download the latest release of Alpaca, visit http://www.alpacajs.org. We make available distributions with all of the source code and examples.

Or you can visit our GitHub project, pull the source and build it yourself:
https://github.com/gitana/alpaca

What's New?

This release introduces several new features and bug fixes.

Added Preview of Alpaca Designer

Alpaca Designer provides drag-and-drop form building plus real-time testing of different combinations of JSON Schema and options configurations within a unified visual client. Alpaca includes the designer along with the source code for the forms engine itself. Our aspiration, going forward, is that the designer will provide a foundation implementation that others can extend and contribute to for use within their own projects.

Default Field Values

Alpaca fields now handle default or unassigned values more appropriately. The JSON is effectively thinned out by removing any values that need not be expressed based on their default and required attributes.

Improved Error Handling

The "error" handler passed into the Alpaca constructor is now properly chained down to child field so that downstream errors propagate back up and find the intended handler. The default error handler is still resorted to for non-render chain errors.

Documentation + Example updates for jQuery/jQuery UI dependent fields

Several of the Alpaca fields that depend on jQuery or jQuery UI (such as the WYSIWYG, DatePicker and DateTimePicker) now have improved documentation to indicate these dependencies. They also feature better examples of how to pass in configuration to customize the underlying dependent controls.

File Field selection handling

The File Field now lets you specify a "selectionHandler" function. If provided and if the HTML5 File API is available, the selection handler will be invoked when a file is selected within the form for upload (but before clicking submit). This allows for inline thumbnails and other uses as shown in the new example for the file field.

Simpler Web Site + Resources

The Alpaca Web Site navigation was cleaned up a bit and simplified. A few broken links were fixed. And a resources page was added to help people find tools and future addons.

Get Involved

We encourage our community to download and try out the 1.1.1 release. For all active projects, we encourage developers to upgrade to the 1.1.1 release for all the latest bug fixes and updates.

For code-level information on what has changed, please check the commit log.

We invite everyone to get involved. Alpaca is a community-led project and benefits greatly from community code fixes, patches, issues and feedback. Want to add a feature? Found a bug? Feel free to fork the code and submit a pull-request. Or submit an issue and ask the community what they think. We're building Alpaca for you and would love to have your contributions.

Alpaca Release 1.1.0

The Alpaca project team is pleased to announce the release of Alpaca 1.1.0.

What is Alpaca?

Alpaca is an open-source project that provides an easy way to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a jQuery plugin and provides a nice abstraction so that you can change form layouts, validation logic and presentation with simple changes to JSON.

Alpaca provides the web forms engine for Cloud CMS and can be used within your own standalone projects.

Download

To download the latest release of Alpaca, visit http://www.alpacajs.org. We make available distributions with all of the source and examples.

Or you can visit our GitHub project, pull the source and build it yourself:
https://github.com/gitana/alpaca

What's New?

This release introduces several new features and bug fixes.

Improved Validation Handling

Several fixes related to form validation, including fixed map and array key invalidation handling. Timing of validation improved so that checks are performed less frequently and only when needed. Initial data entry no longer causes a flicker as the validation state changes.

User Interface styling

The user interface CSS styling and classes have been improved and in some places extended to allow for more control of the look and feel of forms as fields change states. Markers are now provided for first and last elements in a container list. An effort has been made to remove the amount of excess white space generated for default forms. Some improvements for Bootstrap.

Events, Triggers and Handers

An initial framework has been added for binding events to fields directly (as opposed to the DOM). Each field now has on() and trigger() methods for firing events. Events propagated up the field chain allowing for upward-cascaded listeners. Initial events provided for validation.

Support for JSON Schema References

JSON Schema supports $ref references in both the v3 and v4 versions of its specification. Alpaca now provides support for $ref elements allowing you to create more complex schemas with reusable data elements or nested structures. Circular references are automatically calculated and reported as errors. Examples have been provided for how to use references which we feel is a very powerful feature going forward.

Improved Connectors / Removal of URI loading

Alpaca no longer tries to dynamically load URIs for data elements that start with http, https or path indicators (like ./ or /). New parameters are provided on Alpaca construction (dataSource, schemaSource, optionsSource) to allow for remote loading. Improved connector pattern for asynchronous loading is faster and more reliable.

Object and Array non-required empties

Alpaca now properly leaves fields undefined if they are arrays or objects, have zero child elements and are not required. Previously, Alpaca would populate with an empty array or empty object. Now this only happens if the field is required. This reduces the size of JSON output from Alpaca forms (and results in the correct and expected data).

Fix to logging facility

There was a bug that prevent the log() method from properly providing debug and trace information. This has been sorted. Special thanks to @urba for finding this and submitting a patch.

Updates to documentation and web site

In many places, the documentation has been extended to provide better details on fields and their uses. More examples are provided and the Alpaca JS web site has been cleaned up to provide more information, better organized and with better theming.

Get Involved

We encourage our community to download and try out the 1.1.0 release. For all active projects, we encourage developers to upgrade to the 1.1.0 release for all the latest bug fixes and updates.

For code-level information on what has changed, please check the commit log.

We invite everyone to get involved. Alpaca is a community-led project and benefits greatly from community code fixes, patches, issues and feedback. Want to add a feature? Found a bug? Feel free to fork the code and submit a pull-request. Or submit an issue and ask the community what they think. We're building Alpaca for you and would love to have your contributions.