Posted by sramey82 on March 11, 2011 at 7:24pm
I am currently assessing Drupal as a possible solution for building an application intensive website. A dynamic form builder with built-in editor, a tool for querying data based on up to 25 conditions/user choices. These can be anything from drop-down menus, to check boxes. The query result must also be on the same page as the search form. Basically all of the site examples I have seen for Drupal are information sites, like say a magazine or charity, or eCommerce sites. Does Drupal work well with business applications and sites that require many data-entry forms?
Comments
Sure Drupal can do that
Drupal has no problems with the concept you are after. Unfortunately most business apps I've done are intranet but the concepts you are putting forward remain basic. If you are considering D6 then look into the Views module to satisfy your querying and filter requirements. For form building you are most certainly looking into cck amongst others. If you are after a fresh install of D7 then make sure to vet all of the contrib modules and the stability of their releases.
Yes, but
Drupal is all about forms, but there is no existing visual form builder available that I know of. The closest I can think of is this module: http://drupal.org/project/form_builder, but it's the part of a commercial site, so I wouldn't expect a full-featured public release any time soon.
If you're looking for a CMS with a visual form builder built-in, I don't think you'll find it in Drupal. But Drupal has a very robust API for manipulating forms, so it's definitely worth looking into. And like Steve said, Views is a visual query builder that's one of Drupal's major strong points.
Would you not say that cck
Would you not say that cck itself is a visual form builder???
Sure!
Oh, for sure. It's not a generic front-end to Form API, though.
http://drupal.org/project/web
http://drupal.org/project/webform
Is it easy task?
Is this solution easy to implement?
We need to have a web application with forms that has code in the back Ajax queries/interaction... not simple webforms for submitting data. For example dynamic search updates based on CCK field choices, and a very customized UI layout.
Regarding views, we have tried to do an exercise with the master detail content type connected via a node reference, and we haven't been able to avoid duplicate records. We want to show only the master record and filter base on the child. Unfortunately, the distinct property is not working, and we don't know how to alter the query.. etc. After looking at alternatives, such as the views query modifier, it is beginning to appear that much of the site will have to be built from scratch. Basically building custom Drupal modules, and at that point one starts to wonder if going through the Drupal learning curve is worthwhile. Not to sound too down. Could you please share some case studies similar or close to our project?
Thanks for all the help and input! It is greatly appreciated.
-sean
Custom modules
I'm building a student tracking database system in Drupal 6 right now. It's all custom modules, about 10K lines of code at this point. Leveraging the Drupal API makes producing stuff quickly very easy. Take a look at the examples module if you haven't already for code examples.
John Romine
Drupal vs. Custom
I have found that Drupal is very good for multiple contributors for (relatively) static content. For a site that needs extensive interaction with a database or an external server probably needs to be custom-developed. I have done sites both ways. I would not try to use Drupal for one site that has a very large database where all of the content on most pages comes from the database as determined by user provided values.
One thing to keep in mind are
One thing to keep in mind are all the other benefits of Drupal that surround and support your specific functionality. You get a very secure foundation ready for SEO, user management, extensibility with numerous other features, a mature architecture with clean separation of content and style, etc...
I've been in similar situations as you describe where I later found myself with regret for not choosing a strong foundation. I inevitably found myself reinventing vast portions of the wheel.
Now, Drupal may still been a poor fit for you, but I encourage you to consider what you would need beyond your obvious functionality. It will pay off handsomely later, and should not get in your way in the meantime. In fact, as John Romine states, a strong foundation can give you plenty to work with.
All the best in your endeavor...
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Data 'querying'
For data querying you may want to consider Apache Solr so you can facet on the collected information. To take it one step beyond you could also do Apachesolr Views which views-enables Solr to allow for as many different facet-pages as you need.