Creating a Dynamic/Custom form

Rails
1

I am pretty new at rails and seem to be stuck on an issue.

Trying to find a way to get me app admin to create a form on our rails
app. These would include:

  • Select form control type
  • Select required validation
  • Select price change if selected

How should I even start going at this?

2

On 10 January 2011 14:46, RogerM [email protected] wrote:

I am pretty new at rails and seem to be stuck on an issue.

Trying to find a way to get me app admin to create a form on our rails
app. These would include:

  • Select form control type

What is a form control type?

  • Select required validation

What does that mean

  • Select price change if selected

Don’t understand that either, sorry.
In fact I don’t understand what you mean by the app admin creating a
form.

Colin

3

What is a form control type?

  • Select required validation

What does that mean

  • Select price change if selected

Don’t understand that either, sorry.
In fact I don’t understand what you mean by the app admin creating a form.

Hi Colin, sorry I am probably not using proper terminology. I have a
subdomin type rails application. I am trying to get the administrator
users of the subdomain account to create an HTML form, something
similar to phpform.org.

Roger

4

Can anyone shed some details or point me in the correct direction?

In a nutshell I am trying to get the users in my app to create and use
web forms. I found a great jQuery example, I just have no idea how-to
save the form structure to db then render it and saving users answers/
options to the rendered form.

Roger

5

Not sure if it’s the best way, but here’s an idea. For each custom form,
use some combination of serialized db fields (one to hold the form
meta-data (field-types, field names, etc.) and a corresponding field to
hold the data.

Garrett L.

6

Garrett L. wrote in post #975922:

Not sure if it’s the best way, but here’s an idea. For each custom form,
use some combination of serialized db fields (one to hold the form
meta-data (field-types, field names, etc.) and a corresponding field to
hold the data.

If you’re using a relational database, I think it would actually be
better to have Form, Field, ValueSet, and Value models (and associated
tables):

class Form < AR::B
has_many :fields
has_many :records

class Field < AR::B
belongs_to :form
has_many :values

class Record < AR::B
belongs_to :form

maybe belongs_to :user or something

has_many :values

class Value < AR::B
belongs_to :field
belongs_to :record

(Record is my ad-hoc term for one user’s response, filling in all form
fields. There may be a better name. Also, some :throughs in there may
make life easier, depending on the use case.)

This might be a good candidate for a non-relational solution such as
MongoDB.

Garrett L.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

7

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote in post #975923:

Garrett L. wrote in post #975922:

Not sure if it’s the best way, but here’s an idea. For each custom form,
use some combination of serialized db fields (one to hold the form
meta-data (field-types, field names, etc.) and a corresponding field to
hold the data.

If you’re using a relational database, I think it would actually be
better to have Form, Field, ValueSet, and Value models (and associated
tables):

Er, sorry. I changed ValueSet to Record and missed that instance.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

8

On Jan 18, 9:12pm, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

If you’re using a relational database, I think it would actually be
better to have Form, Field, ValueSet, and Value models (and associated
tables):

Thanks I am going to give that a try.

9

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote in post #975923:

If you’re using a relational database, I think it would actually be
better to have Form, Field, ValueSet, and Value models (and associated
tables)
I would agree, especially if you’re going to use this concept in a
variety of circumstances. If it’s just one customization on one model
then I might be inclined to go the other way in some cases. Debatable.

Garrett L.