Generating a form from SQL Server database

Question

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone knows of a product (free or licensable) that allows you to generate a Web Form from looking into a database table. We have to be able to generate staff surveys - our company is quite big, and occasionally the form fields change. Ultimately this means one of our dev's have to go and modify some ASP.NET webform to factor in the new field. Not good when things change every month :(

What we were thinking was a metadata table that describes some of these forms and an engine that will render a form based on the metadata. That will require two interfaces, one to add the fields/layout options. The other is the front-end for actually filling out this form.

Seeing solutions like Zoomerang makes me think this is what its doing, but I'm not wanting to re-invent the wheel to write the backend - adding fields, wiring etc.

Our environment is .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005/2008.

Answer 1

There are several out there I believe. Subsonic scaffolding is one and Rails is another

Answer 2

This is almost certainly lower level than you're looking for, but look into T4 templates combined with Sql DMO. You can query the structure of the database and generate the form using the templates.

T4 templates are built into Sql Server 2005 or available as a download for Visual Studio 2005. They're pretty cool.

Answer 3

Using Dynamic Data Entity Framework might work. Although rough, it can literally be up and running in < 5 minutes, allowing users to perform basic CRUD operations.