I'm building this online form thing which allows the user to create forms for use on their intranet (or Internet) site. It's for things like Business Cases, Capex and stuff, internal mission critical forms - but it's driving me nuts!
Basically, the idea is that the user (an Admin person) is meant to be able to come in and re-create an existing 'paper' form in my application.
In itself that's easy - but because their current forms (which are paper based) are laid out in a certain way with each one different then my form
creator had to allow for custom arrangement of the form fields via a interface more meaningful than just numerically ordered.
I've gone with the rather cool drag-n-drop (JQuery Portlets - see
http://www.bbc.co.uk for example) thing, where the user creates the fields (title, field, data type and help text) and is then presented with a page where the fields are laid out in default order (as they were entered) - the user can then drag-n-drop fields as much as they like rearranging the form and the changes are saved to the database. That template is then applied to that questionnaire...
That's the basic idea anyway - and it sounds easy enough.... lol.... but it's not going so well.
I keep hitting 'issues' which stump me for ages and then I get distracted/lose interest.... like now.
Cool bit of software this one thou - in the back end (Admin areas) there's all sorts of reports and fancy graphs, work-flow and a few others - and it's all packaged within a document management system designed to better centralise manuals and increase their accessibility at the same time. It compliments the application rather well me thinks.
Basically I'm trying to take this organisation (I think the largest SOE in NZ) and get rid of all the mountains of paper.... there's a lot of $$$ in doing that at the moment, reorganising data-flows... it amazing how much the large organisations save in staff time annually when everything is just 'there', simple and accessible.
YAY the recession!
Anyway - the logic in the database keeps doing my brain in... so I give up for that night.