[kwlug-disc] web-based forms wizard

Daniel Allen dada.da at gmail.com
Sun Jun 21 23:53:33 EDT 2009


Hey you wise libre-software people,

I'm looking for an open-source "forms wizard" such as the one found in Open
Office.  Only, it has to run over the web.  Does anyone have suggestions?

The existing project is in PHP, and we're using MySQL (v4) databases.

The set of tasks it should accomplish are:

1) allow non-programmer users to generate web-forms which can save data to
the database
2) allow non-programmer users to define portions of the database as "views"
which may be displayed in a spreadsheet-like format (optionally editable).

and:

3) validate input data according to preset criteria (eg., "account codes
must match regex format" or "value must match an existing value in this
other table")


I've looked at OpenOffice BASE and it seemed way too complicated for
non-programmer users.

The competition in windows-land is fairly strong: a Microsoft web/server
product called SharePoint will store web-visible tables (it calls "lists"),
forms can be built in a windows-only gui program to save data to these
lists, and if you download a "list", it will open in Excel for editing, and
changes are propagated back to the online database. ...Of course it doesn't
work properly with Mac Excel, and of course its supposed ODBC support is so
weak that you can only use it with Microsoft SQL, but on windows... it looks
really slick.

Hopeful someone has run across open-source tools that might fit the bill.

-Daniel
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