Hi Mark,
No problem!
There as always are many ways to accomplish this, and this sounds like
this will be largely an exercise in Javascript, but on the PHP/SQL side
you'll just need to design a table where rows correspond to information
that pertains to the whole form (username or ID, title, stuff like that)
and then a second table that corresponds to form fields for the form,
and are linked via an ID field. I do a similar thing for some shopping
cart software that allows the administrator to build custom forms to
collect information for particular items for sale. It works pretty well.
Is there something in particular you're struggling with or does this help?
The hard part I think will be associating the javascript drag/drop
events with information storage in the database. This to me would work
well with a small javascript routine that will upon dropping call
XMLRequest to a server side script that will update the table
immediatly. Then you don't have to mess with some grotesque hidden form
madness to keep track of what the user wants.
-Micah
Mark Fellowes wrote:
Micah, Thanks for the reply. I didn't see it earlier. Also my
apologies for the vagueness but right now things are somewhat vauge.
Let me try and explain better:
To start I'll paint a visual to explain it better. Ultimately I know
this will require additional tables (will get to that in a moment)
When the page loads, there is going to be a "palette" area where form
fields of various types will be sitting. They will not be in a form.
The form will sit in another part of the page in it's own div. So to
start the table all that should be generated into that palette area
will be the form elements (selects, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc).
I'm thinking php will be used to pull the markup out of the table and
into the palette.
Users can drag and drop form elements into the form. They can edit the
elements in there (i.e. length of field, label name, required field,
etc). At that point the chosen elements (the ones now in the form)
should be pumped back into another table where a name column will save
the form intact with all it's elements.
Hope this gives a better idea of what I"m trying to acheive.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: micah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 4:01 PM -07:00
To: Mark Fellowes [Zanoni@xxxxxxxxx]
Subject: Generating forms and form elements
Hi Mark,
That's pretty vague, there's probably 1000 ways to do this. Are you just
intending to store the HTML in a text field, or generate the form fields
based on data so that the user can edit the data? Are you storing just
data in the database, or the form structure? Also if it's structure, do
you intend on storing formatting information, or just the form fields
themselves.
If you sit down and draw up a detailed non-code plan, the solution would
likely present itself.
-Micah
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