[kwlug-disc] web-based forms wizard

[Daniel Allen]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 12:03 AM, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> Look at Drupal + the Webform module. It does most of what you said.
>
> http://drupal.org/project/webform
>

Thanks, and this leads to the interesting question of whether the rest of
the application might migrate to drupal eventually as well.  Which would
probably make for easier maintenance.

Though, at present, I'd need to convince the developer team that drupal /
webform will do what we want (eg., do the validations easily).

I'll investigate further tomorrow, but so far it looks like I need to build
select-lists through some other means; and there might not be validation
lookups from other tables without manually coding them each time, which is
more programmer-intensive than I'd hoped for...

If you want to ask the author questions, he is presenting at the Toronto DUG
> this Tuesday at 6:30 pm.
>
> See http://groups.drupal.org/toronto for details.
>
> Say hi to Nate if you go.
>

Hm, great timing there. I will find out if anyone from the programming team
can go!

Thanks again, -Daniel


>
> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 11:53 PM, Daniel Allen <dada.da at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>
>
>
> --
> Khalid M. Baheyeldin
> 2bits.com, Inc.
> http://2bits.com
> Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
> Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
> Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
>
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