Re: Form builder?

webb(dot)sprague(at)gmail(dot)com wrote:

We wrote a system that does exactly that, its called "Andromeda", and it
is GPL.

http://docs.andromeda.com

It uses a data dictionary to do two things: 1) build the database and 2)
generate HTML maintenance forms. But it can also have multiple virtual
sites going into the same database, so in many cases we have the "admin"
site which is generated for free and then 1 or more public sites reading
the same database but intended for anonymous access. These other sites
go through a professional design process quite different from the
table-maintence sites.

It also automatically generates links to child and parent tables based
on foreign keys, so for a table "customers" you will see a link
automatically generated for "orders" that goes to that customer's orders.

Our largest project technically has about 290+ tables, our most active
project is a system of about 30 tables in which we've made small hacks
to a couple of pages to enhance the defaults.

The codebase is extremely small. The main library is less than 10,000
lines, easy to walk through and change.

The default interface has been tested on IE and Firefox, and also
supports keyboard navigation (at least on Firefox).

The project is running on PHP and currently targets postgres. We run on
Linux. In principle it can run on Windows but we haven't tried.

If you would like to see a running system I can give you an account any
of our systems under development and you can see it.

>I don't want to revisit or be redundant... but is there a quick and
>dirty and cross-platform system for developing user input forms for
>Postgres? Ideally, I am interested in something such that you can give
>it ("it" being something like a Python function) a table name,
>resulting in a magically appearing input form. It should be able to
>deal with getting the format more or less correct for a datatype, not
>displaying system columns, etc, using the system tables to get the
>necessary info.
>
>I thought first about hacking xdialog, but they don't have multiple
>field forms. I have looked at wx, but real gui programing is complex
>and not general. Right now I have an ugly hack that writes out a text
>file with colon separated lines for each row, with a defaults option so
>that you can chain together a set of One-Many forms (eg you enter a
>person, then you can cycle through with library books each referencing
>that person in a for loop).
>
>I would rather trade ease of use for functionality, if it can get it
>90% correct just by the table name and the defaults. And I refuse to
>use XML. And I want pure Linux. If I have to develop the darn thing,
>of course I am happy to share.
>
>I want to develop an anthropological fieldwork database, but the form
>based data entry is important for ease of use.
>
>Cheers.
>
>
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