How would you implement a form submission templating system

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How would you implement a form submission templating system

hello, I need to implement a form tamplate system. The form needs to be very dynamic. It will need:

Multiple textboxes
Multiple dropdown menus
Multiple Number fields
Multiple Date fields
Single Image field
Single Submit button

Any or all of these fields can be blank but must follow the field type. Therefore letters cannot go in number fields.

The form needs to grab all the values and there could be from 1 to 300 fields in one form or more. I could not find any examples of how to implement this online. Once I grap all these values I need to store them in the database. I think I know how to store them in the database but I am puzzled on how to extract the information from the form.

Have you looked into any of the existing options, like XForms? I believe this company produces a fairly nice product: http://www.orbeon.com/

Adobe has a nice product (which even scales to enterprise levels with things like LiveCycle) if you're OK with plugins / non-html-only... although they do offer HTML rendering, but I believe it's limited.

If you are OK with the price of Sharepoint, Microsoft has InfoPath, which is sorta neat.

What are your requirements? I'm assuming ASP.NET/ASP MVC based (based on your tags). I'm also assuming cross-browser. Do you need the data back in a particular format, or as a POST to a page? What about complex validations and field bindings?

Steve 2010-07-20 03:10:31

I am looking to build the forms programatically and extract the data from the form to store in the database. I am using asp.net mvc c#. The problem I am having is trying to figure out which direction i should go. Do I develop a form builder or do I develop a way to parse/convert text to a form. I wanted something like mturk.com

Luke101 2010-07-20 03:39:16

Where I work our biggest problem is forms... and I've written two such "form generators" in the past... you run into all sorts of problems, and the requirements need to be carefully evaluated. For example, do you need custom, complex, layouts? If so, it needs to go way beyond simply storing a list of question types, and question texts, then re-displaying them... you need all sorts of layout controls. By the time you're done it will either be a mess OR you'll just be re-doing the work done on XForms already, and only then realize you could have just gone with an off-the-shelf product.

Steve 2010-07-20 03:47:15

Wow. Good point. I will check them out tonight. I'll let you know what happens.

Luke101 2010-07-20 04:26:42

Also, do you know the name of the adobe product?

Luke101 2010-07-20 04:27:20

Adobe LiveCycle Designer is the forms editing component of the larger forms and document workflow product. http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/designer/

Steve 2010-07-20 05:14:46

ansaurus

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How would you implement a form submission templating system

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