Glitches on form for rebaptism

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rparker
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Joined: Thu Jun 12, 2008 12:16 pm
Location: San Antonio, TX

Glitches on form for rebaptism

#1

Post by rparker »

I'm not seeing this addressed elsewhere (though perhaps I haven't entered just the right incantation into the search tool). These are all fairly easily worked around, but are annoying and inconsistent with the rest of MLS.

I see most date fields throughout MLS accepting three letters for the month portion, or a digit (which it converts to the three letter shortening of the month). When filing the form for rebaptism of a member, the month field only accepts digits.

Another quirk of the rebaptism form is that as you tab to subsequent fields, the form does not automatically scroll such that the currently active field becomes visible on the screen. This means that as you progress through the form, you have to remove a hand from the keyboard and find the mouse to adjust the view.

Is anyone else running into these issues (or others like them)? As this form is probably less often used, it may not have had all the bugs worked out. Or perhaps it is unique to our installation of MLS? Again, easy to work around these bugs, but very inconsistent from what I've observed throughout the rest of MLS.
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mkmurray
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#2

Post by mkmurray »

Although I have not verified this myself, I think this is a good catch for the MLS developers to take note of. I think you're right that because it is less often used than many other parts of MLS, the kinks haven't been worked out for this form as quickly as the most often used portions of MLS.
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aebrown
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#3

Post by aebrown »

RickParker wrote:I'm not seeing this addressed elsewhere (though perhaps I haven't entered just the right incantation into the search tool). These are all fairly easily worked around, but are annoying and inconsistent with the rest of MLS.

I see most date fields throughout MLS accepting three letters for the month portion, or a digit (which it converts to the three letter shortening of the month). When filing the form for rebaptism of a member, the month field only accepts digits.

Another quirk of the rebaptism form is that as you tab to subsequent fields, the form does not automatically scroll such that the currently active field becomes visible on the screen. This means that as you progress through the form, you have to remove a hand from the keyboard and find the mouse to adjust the view.

Is anyone else running into these issues (or others like them)? As this form is probably less often used, it may not have had all the bugs worked out. Or perhaps it is unique to our installation of MLS? Again, easy to work around these bugs, but very inconsistent from what I've observed throughout the rest of MLS.
These problems are certainly not unique to your installation of MLS. In fact, what you report is true of all the Confidential Forms -- they have only digits for the months and they don't scroll automatically.

The months as digits is a significant problem when forms are filled out by hand. Often forms are printed with much of the information, but other parts are filled in by hand. In the US, the standard date order is month/day/year, but all MLS forms are day/month/year. We get enough forms turned in to our stake with dates like 5/13/2008 that I know that people are falling into old habits rather than looking carefully at the date format specified on the form. So when we get dates like 7/8/2008, it's tough to know whether July 8 or August 7 is intended. But for day/month/year format, if people will always write 8 Jul 2008, there will be no doubt.

So I would strongly vote for dd/Mmm/yyyy format. I would also like to see the forms changed to not simply say "day, mo., year" but also add an example or somehow tell people to write out the month abbreviation.
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