Dynamic web form targetting user specified database fields

Question

I have an issue where I'm creating a greenfield web application using ASP.NET MVC to replace a lengthy paper form that manually gets (mostly) entered into an existing SQL Server 2005 database. So the front end is the new part, but I'm working against an existing moderately normalized schema. I can easily add new tables, views, etc. to the schema, but modifying tables is going to be near impossible. There's currently at least 2 existing applications (that I'm aware of) that reference this schema and I've stumbled upon at least a dozen "SELECT * FROM..." statements in each. They exist both in code and in views/triggers/stored procs/etc. That's why modifying existing table schemas is a no-go.

All that being said, the form targets different fields in multiple tables in database. It also has to be dynamic enough to allow the end users to add new questions targeting fields. The end users have a rough idea of the existing database schema so they're savvy enough to know how to pick out tables/fields to be targeted.

I'm have a really rough idea of how I could tackle this, but it seems like complete overkill and will be difficult to write up. I'm hoping somebody might have a simple(r) way of handling this sort of project that I haven't thought of.

Answer 1

If users know DB schema maybe you should go with Dynamic Data project and just create a web app front end of that DB to them. So you would only make the model they need and do the application that will display data from those tables with insert/edit capabilities.

But it's completely different story if they have some additional functionality to it.