David said >> Why not write a form generator?
I said >> zero administration.
I say now: Huh, what was I saying?
Paul said >>
The only solution I can come up with, is to create a custom tag to generate
the custom HTML tags we want from a limited source, and then we get back to:
"Why not ignore CF for the most part and just write it in HTML". For the
amount of control we want, creating a CSS and using the client side is far
more sensible, especially as you can change everything you want!
Eric now says >>
(I posted after an 8:15PM hockey game - you know the score). What I meant to
say was?
If you mean using a desktop form generator and post static html forms that
can be customized, it won't work because I have dynamic form requirements.
ie Member driven, non-technical, web based form (or data structure)
creation.
If you mean. create an online form generator. yeah that's what I want. And
as for performance you could stage or cache the created forms, until someone
changes design or structures.
I think what I need to do, is build. I have an idea of what I want, just not
quite sure how to get there.
Thanks
Eric
rambling noise.
I am losing track of the conversation a little bit so bear with me. But my
last post was 2:30AM, and this one started back at work at 6:45AM so that's
my excuse.
I think we are actually in agreement. But I think I need to learn more. I am
immature in my thoughts and have grey areas that are filled with black
magic.
To clarify why I think dynamic form generation is cool, I have two
applications in mind.
1.) Member Defined Profiles
A Member registration site stores basic profile information. In addition, I
want to be able to extend the profiling capabilities to allow the Members to
create forms to collect information based on their needs. There is no limit
to the number of profiles that can be created for any particular Member.
Example:
Sports Portal site. Members can join
1.) Sports Interest Groups
2.) Sports Organizations / Leagues etc.
Member starts with a basic profile:
1.) MemberID, Email, Password, Reminder, ReminderAnswer
2.) ExtendedProfile (Address, Phone etc.)
The Member joins some Sport Interest groups. Hockey and Football say, and
the administrators of the sport interest groups might want some profile
information. These profiles/personas/forms/pages (whatever) are added to the
Members profile, so he can return at any time to edit the information that
is offered to the administrators.
Later on he joins a league. Additional profile information is required to
process the member's registration. this is added as an additional page to
his profile.
Some notes: for the most part these profiles are Member generated, so there
needs to be a tool for the Member to build the pages and structures that are
going to hold the information. These are not neccessarily technical people
so it needs to be friendly.
In my head it would be easiest to simply store the structure somewhere.
Form.DTD? XML? and then dynamically render the form when it comes time to
collect the data. Store the data as a generic XML packet.
Now the extension is that the form can have presentation information stored
as well.
From: "Paul Johnston" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: CF-Talk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: Custom Tag for creating Forms...
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 09:28:35 -0000
Both correct, but...
There is such a thing as CSS. If you think about it, the most useful thing
about HTML is that some of the attributes are defaulted on the client
machine. Bear this in mind, and you could easily create a form.
BTW a form generator is something that takes some data and generates a form.
If I'm not mistaken, creating a structure to hold some data and then
generating a form from it is exactly that.
The way I see it is that if you want something like this, then you have to
create certain basic form types with specific defaults. The best way to do
this would be to have a server side process to create the form with various
defaults. Here we go into the realms of CSS which is a perfectly good
client side technology. Why try and create something that isn't really
going to save a huge amount of time.
The only solution I can come up with, is to create a custom tag to generate
the custom HTML tags we want from a limited source, and then we get back to:
"Why not ignore CF for the most part and just write it in HTML". For the
amount of control we want, creating a CSS and using the client side is far
more sensible, especially as you can change everything you want!
I hope that's clear.
Paul
PS Has anyone created a dynamic stylesheet yet? What I mean is, has anyone
made a CFM page that is a stylesheet (and would it be worthwhile?).
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Dawson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2001 7:11 AM
To: CF-Talk
Subject: Re: Custom Tag for creating Forms...
>>Why not write a form generator?
zero administration.
just cuz you asked.
doesn't mean you can't cashe the generated form.
(wait a minute aren't both scenarios "form generators". (i mnow what you
mean though).
E
From: David Cummins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: CF-Talk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Custom Tag for creating Forms...
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 10:42:03 +1300
I think a custom tag is going about it the wrong way... extra processing
time,
limited formatting...
Why not write a form generator? Creates the CF code for you, then you just
tailor? What would be even better is if its generated code were delimited
into
sections, and it could detect if you inserted extra code, so if you changed
the
formatting, you wouldn't lose your custom code.
David Cummins
Peter Theobald wrote:
>
> So the real trick is making it extensible so you can use it to lay out a
"basic default" form, but override certain things to customize it.
>
> The design I had worked out didn't assume you only had one field per
row.
It let you put as many fields as you liked in a row. It would add up the
number of fields on each row, multiply them all for a "common" denominator,
and use that as the number of columns in a table. Each table cell would use
rowspan to use up the appropriate space. Everything would come out neat and
lined up...
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