Quick Advice Regarding Use of Fabrik

[Senyors]

I'm looking to develop a component for Joomla 3.x and Fabrik seems like a great option. I've been a Joomla administrator for many years, I've done a lot of ASP.NET programming and even some PHP development, but I've never attempted to program something for Joomla before. I read on the Fabrikar.com site that newbies like me may want to check with the community to see if the scope of a new project is appropriate for Fabrik, so I'm hoping for some quick advice.

My goal is to take a current PC-based program and build an online version (with the full consent and authorization of the original developer, of course). Basically, the program allows a user to construct a fantasy image from a series of choices (head, torso, left hand, right hand, feet, background, etc.). These choices, when combined, should produce a final graphic image.

I think that Fabrik can handle the entire project except for the visualization element--I'm not sure how that may work. So, my primary question is this: Is it possible to develop a custom visualization that, when fed parameters from a series of dropdown menus, can build a single image from a series of image layers? Put another way, is there an image-based visualization that I can leverage in my project, or would I need to develop that from scratch (and if so, is that even possible using Fabrik?).

Would anyone have any advice for a newbie just getting started with Fabrik?

 

[jfquestiaux]

If the final purpose is to "build" an image to display or download, you can use the HTML 5 <canvas> tag to "draw" your image on, then use available scripts to enable download of this image.

 

[Senyors]

Yes, that sounds plausible. Basically, my hope is to "stack" a series of .png images on top of one another to produce a final image. If I can use some combination of HTML 5/JavaScript/JQuery to display the image (with inputs determined by a series of associated dropdown menus), that would be ideal. Does that sound doable with the Fabrik component?

...and thanks for the response!

 

[jfquestiaux]

To draw on an HTML 5 canvas, you do it programmatically, so the only thing you really need is the <src> ref of each image, then use the image methods of the canvas to place them wherever you want in the canvas.
Using dropdowns or other elements (like the colourpicker or the picklist), Fabrik can "gather" all the pieces of the puzzle. You will need then to code a custom template with the <canvas> tag and the appropriate Javascript code to draw the final result.

 

[Senyors]

OK, sounds like a plan. I'll start learning Fabrik and slowly work toward such a goal. Thanks for the help--it sounds like Fabrik can help me.