Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters ?

[gilbertro]

Has anyone ever had this challenge:

I have created a web app that is used by a wide range of users. Each customer that purchases the system, I end up having to create many specialized/customized data entry/view forms (and letters/templates) for them as they try to go paperless. So I use the dialog component for this and store to MySQL. Its hard to keep track of each customer's (customized) software as you can imagine and I spend alot of time designing them.

I wish I had a way to allow my end-users to create their own forms that would eventually be saved inside my Alpha Five v11 Web app. Maybe a third party tool could be used for this ? I don't know of any. Maybe this tool would allow the form definition and data to be stored outside of Alpha Five and then Alpha Five records could link to these external files ?

Does anyone have any suggestions ?

[agillbb]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

No suggestions, but surely this means that business is booming for you? Not a bad situation to be in

[christappan]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

Within Alpha Five, you could get reasonably creative with the visual organization of fields, using things like language tags for labels and the OnGridInitialize/OnGridExecute events to rearrange the order of things, but it would likely be complex to build and you'd still have a customer that wanted something outside your one-size-fits-all approach.

You could also go the route of letting them build Word Documents or PDFs with form fields that you then wrote scripts to extract data, but it wouldn't be all that user-friendly and would still be displayed in a standard view when they viewed the data already in the database...

[billamidon]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

Start with extra tables for UDFs and add UDFs to your base tables, i.e. udf1, udf2, etc. tie everything to a DD (data dictionary) to do the definition conversion, so udf1 shows a label description, length in your DD. When you build the screens they translate the fields to label them from the DD. You setup a bunch of the udf of various types, udf_c1...udf_c100, udf_n1....udf_n100, udf_d1...udf_d100, etc. You have screens and page frames capable of displaying everything, but only show those that the user actually defined.

[agillbb]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

That might actually work. With all the possible interactions that go on, I would be surprised if it was so straight-forward, though. You may achieve a basic functionality, however, but the back-end complexity will be great.

[kkfin]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

Maybe a third party tool could be used for this ? I don't know of any. Maybe this tool would allow the form definition and data to be stored outside of Alpha Five and then Alpha Five records could link to these external files ?

Does anyone have any suggestions ?

Try this one.. It uses MySql so it is suitable for you.

[RichCPT]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

An approach I am attempting to use to show or hide "user-defined" fields and to apply custom color to them is to provide different custom local CSS style sheets for the Grid component. Using various CSS style sheets with one Grid component allows the component to take on many different appearances. At the moment I do not need to allow the order of the user-defined fields to be changed; I just let them be turned on or off and the colors set. Inside the style sheet file I define CSS Class Names to be used by the various "user-defined" fields. I use the "Display:None" attribute in the CSS Classes to hide user-defined fields that the user does not want to see in their customized grid. Before loading a grid the calling procedure loads the desired style sheet. I have forms that let the Application Administrator easily define what user-defined fields will be shown or hidden plus other attributes such as field background color and column heading background color. I just need to write some code to generate the local CSS style sheets based on their choices. In the Grid I am using a number of XBASIC custom controls. You can use the custom control to generate any type of control you like, on-the-fly.

However, there is a problem I constantly run into and that is that Alpha Five is not consistent with what types of Field Controls allow setting of a Class Name and at which level the Class name is to be applied: 1) Cell Level, or 2) Control Level, or 3) both. When I cannot set the Class Name using the grid/field properties I have to set it using Java on the client-side. That's what I have to do to set the column heading class name for my custom controls. I would very much like to see at least the Custom Control support setting of a class Name for the Heading and at what level Cell, Control, Both.

Please, if there is an approach I am missing let me know. Otherwise, if this approach is sound then chime in and let Alpha Five know it would be a benefit to allow more control over the CSS Class property of cells and controls in headings and in the grid.

-Rich Fulham

[2ninerniner2]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

Ken - thanks for the tip!

MachForm has to be one of the coolest form builders out there! I just bought it, installed it locally, whipped up a quick form, made a few entries and yep, there is a new table for that form in its MySQL database. Connect it to a grid or whatever in A5 and have at it :) I also plunked the form into an HTML site as well as into a WordPress page ... too cool! Not sure yet how it would handle a parent-child form, but for a single table, it's a snap. Although it has a built-in viewer (grid) for the table and has the ability to export as XLS, CVS and TAB, it would be nice to be able to display the viewer within your own pages. I'll have to look into that.

Not too sure how this may help Robert with his challenge, but it would certainly be very easy for his clients to create the forms themselves.

Cheers!
Lyle

[gilbertro]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

I started looking at Machform (thanks to Ken) and it really looks good. I am not sure if it can solve my challenge just yet.

Lyle or Ken, How do you connect it to a grid in Alpha Five ? Would I be using url ? as in cases with API for RESTFUL webservices ? My software stores contacts. Each contact may have several forms attached to them of different types. I guess I would have to do all the management of the forms from Alpha side.

Can you give me an example of how Alpha Five will tell Machform to create a new entry for "form1" for contact1 vs say another type "form2" for contact2 ? I didn't see how I could do that but still thinking it through.

I thank everyone so far for their input.

[2ninerniner2]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

Robert -

It's quite easy, actually. I just did another quick sample and this is all there is to it to get a quick, A5 form tied to the MachForm:

MachForm
- create the MachForm and save
- this creates a new table in the MachForm MySQL database with the name of ap_form_#, where# is the sequence number of how many forms you have created; ap_form_2 is the second one I have created

A5
- create a new AlphaDAO Connection String that connects to the MachForm database (and ALL the forms you create with it)
- create a new Grid of the Single record Form - view, edit, insert, delete (SQL) <<<this is what I used for my sample; you could use whichever SQL type you prefer>>>
- set the connection string to the one created above, choose the table ("form") you want to use (ap_form_2 in my case) and proceed as you would any other grid

NOTE:

I am running all of this locally on a Win7 Home Premium Lenovo laptop. The "local hosting" for Apache, MySQL and PHP is being provided by my all-time favourite WAMP stack, The Uniform Server (TUS) :) The beauty of it is that it does not "install" anything on your system ... it just "sits there", all in one folder that can easily be moved around (plus, it is also production-grade and ready).

So what I did was, started TUS, created a new folder in the root (www), unzipped the MachForm download, created a new, empty MySQL db using phpMyAdmin (starts from the TUS control panel), ran the MachForm install, created a couple forms and that's about it :)

I also installed WordPress into TUS and placed a MachForm into a page; works perfectly :)

For 39 bux, I'm impressed! :) So much so that I will be buying the Unlimited Licence upgrade. (the $39 one is good for one "site" and a localhost ... not sure if "site" is a hosting account or one domain ... will have to check further, but either way, it sure is slick!)

[kkfin]

Re: Way to allow my customers to create their own customized data entry forms/letters

If you are using reverse proxy as a front to Alpha (for example Abyss X2 newest version) then you can serve Machform to the customer from same machine( or other) AND FROM SAME DOMAIN, that means for example mydomain.com/webforms and your customer really don't notice that in fact you are you are using different server(Abyss) to serve Machforms. But this maybe out of this threads scope.