web-based forms wizard
Hola!
I posted to kwlug-list asking about a web-based forms wizard; the first response has brought me here to investigate drupal. Quoting my post:
I'm looking for an open-source "forms wizard" such as the one found in Open Office. [...]
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 and editable tables (it calls "lists"), forms can be built in a windows-only gui program, 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.
Khalid B. (hi?) responded:
Look at Drupal + the Webform module. It does most of what you said.
http://drupal.org/project/webform
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.
As interesting as this module looks, I am concerned about the mechanics of building forms with validation- from what I read, it still requires a programmer's work at the back end on each form.
Also: I haven't browsed into drupal deeply enough to find out whether you can easily create nodes drawing data from existing mySQL tables. (Is this "views"?)
If there happens to be a reader who is on the U of W campus, I would gladly trade half an hour of your time to show you our existing application and get feedback on drupal's capabilities/strengths for our purposes, in exchange for lunch...
Thanks for feedback, and cheers, -Daniel
Ical feed
Webform is certainly worth
Webform is certainly worth looking into. It supports putting in PHP snippets for validation, so you may need to extend that to pre-build validators if you wanted to make it simpler to build forms.
As well, there the Views module which is very good at displaying lists of data. However, it doesn't work with the Webform module (though I'm sure Views support could be added). So, I'd suggest investigating both CCK+Views and Webform, depending on what you plan on doing with the data.
Let us know how it goes... this could be a neat presentation for our local group.
Cheers,
--Andrew
Thanks Andrew.
Thanks Andrew. My reading of what you just said is that the custom validation snippets can be activated in a form by non-programmer users similarly to choosing the prebuilt validators. That sounds useful.
I'm trying to wrap my head around CCK and how it presents itself to the user- who I'm hoping can be a non-programmer generating the forms..
And also, I'm hoping to figure out if CCK spreadsheet modules might help us for editing/viewing our SQL data (in particular, http://drupalmodules.com/module/sheetnode looks useful, though it doesn't mention ODBC / sql explicitly).