Custom actions and reload views
When a custom action is executed in a view, in some situations, after the action is executed it's necessary a refresh; in other situations the same thing may make the script to not function properly. Examples:
For the first kind of situations, if a field is modified with a custom action, the old values will be shown if the view is not refreshed.
For the second kind of situations, if the script ends with openurl() and the view is refreshed, the url may not opened because the form is refreshed.
I saw that recently ZC team modified the behaviour after custom actions, and the form is not refreshed any more after the exectuion of a custom action. But this creates problems for the situations of the first type above, broking an existing functionality in some cases (because the users expects to see values modified, as happened in previous situations, or even the dissappearance of some records in views based on the criteria related to modified fields).
See an example from my application from Zoho Marketplace
http://creator.zoho.com/demo/george_writer/teamwork-task-manager/zsdemo/#view:Assigned_Articles
If someone is trying to unassign a task or to declare it finished, the script is executed, but because the view is not refreshed automatically, the records are shown there, even if the these should dissapear from the view. Fortunately, I check every few days my application to see if it functions properly. I saw that in less than 2 months the behaviour of some parts changed a few times because of the (not anounced) changes of the platform.
For this specific thing, probably a good solution would be to provide the option to refresh or not the view after the custom action is executed, and to leave the developer to decide if this is needed or not. It may be a simple checkbox in Edit mode at the views, at Custom Actions. Another solution would be to allow refreshing for the situations when this is needed, and to block them when this is not needed (when the executed function finishes with OpenURL().
Anyway, I think that a solution is needed in this case. And please, make a page with latest changes on Zoho Creator and/or the past and future changes which could modify the existing applications' behaviour!
Zoho Creator is a great product, and I really hope that it will succeed on the market. But some things should be improved, and I would be very pleased if all the changes to the platform will be anounced on a public page (actually only major things are writen on the blog, and some changes/fixes on the forum, as responses to particular users - but really, who can read every day every response from the forum?). Many software vendors announce when a new version of the product is released and there is a section with "what's new" or "Release Notes" (see for example http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0.5/releasenotes/), even if there are only bug fixes or minor improvements.
I think that a similar thing would be great for Zoho Creator.
Regards,
George