Re: [SAGE] web form handling software

[John Stoffel <john@stoffel.org>]

Philip> Would anyone have a recommendation for free, or at minimum
Philip> cheap (to universities) software, for handling web forms?

There's tons of software out there for this type of stuff, whether it
does what you want is debatable.  Doing forms in HTTP is *hard*,
especially if you want to be useable across a wide range of browsers.  

Philip> 1. creation and adjustment of web based forms, by non-techies

I think this is where you're going to run into problems.  Would it be
ok to have a techie come up with the base form, and then have the
users tweak it as needed?  

Philip> 2. handles collection of actual data by people clicking
Philip> "submit" on the form

This is not a good definition of a need.  Does the data need to get
inserted into a DB?  Or put into an email message and sent to someone?
How is the data to be sanitized and bounds checking done, etc? 

Philip> I'm pessimistic as to our options, so I would be interested in
Philip> hearing about something free even if it only meets #1. But it
Philip> has to be usable by true "non-techies", eg: web-gui.

You won't find it sorry.  IAt least I don't think you'll find it
easily, since I was looking for something like this about a year ago
and didn't find anything that came close.  I ended up writing all my
code in PHP, and I still don't  have a data entry form working the way
I want.

Philip> No, "perl templating makes it 'easy' to make forms in an
Philip> editor", please :-)

You'll probably end up this route at some point no matter what.  

I was trying to do a basic, normalized database of children's
publishers.  Take a look at http://directory.mwa.org if you're
interested.

The schema of the data meant that there was just a few fixed fields,
and then the rest could have varying numbers of entries.  Very much
like those record album databases used as examples in alot of web
programming books.  Including the O'Reilly mSQL/MySQL book.  

Unfortunately, writing a dynamic form to add/subtract fields
dynacmically before the data is submitted is really hard.  Or you have
to break it down into sub-forms, etc.  A pain.

The closest I found was the PEAR::HTML_QuickForm, and the devlopers
were pretty responsive.  Take a look at:

	http://pear.php.net/package/HTML_QuickForm

And you might find something there that will help you.  

Good luck, it's not an easy problem to solved due to the horrible
limitations of the HTTP protocol.  

John