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| Web-based Form Builder For VWG |
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Over the past few months, there have been several threads talking about run-time form designer. From what I can tell, most of these leverage the Visual Studio designer. While this may work for some applications, it won't work in our HR application. We needed a web-based designer that is targeted at power users, but not programmers.
So we went ahead and built a nice Form Designer and Runtime viewer using VWG. Although our primary focus is the HR application, this Form Builder was developed with the idea that it may have some commercial value. I don't know if there is enough demand to justify supporting it, and we haven't spent much time doing fancy packaging, advertising or even coming up with a name. This posting is to just a trial balloon for us.
However, this is a pretty cool piece of technology, and the least we can do it put it out there and see what reaction there is. At this point, we don't want to open source the technology since its used in a commercial application. However, we are open minded about licensing the source code to companies outside of our space (HR talent management).
I have put together a small presentation that shows the features. We will update this with some video, but this should suffice for now.
Here is the link to the info page:
I have copied in some text from the web page:
Our Business Requirements
A Web-based Form run-time
Web-based Form designer
Two-way Data binding to Business objects.
Support for arbitrary placement of fields (we couldn’t have a form designer that only supports 1 column of fields, for example)
Support for Role-based security that controls visibility and editing
Many-to-one support, with run-time child add/change/delete with security options
Custom validations, formulas and scripting
High performance
Print-Preview
Easy to use, without programming or run-time licensing
No client-side installation required.
Support for very large forms (10+ pages), with manageable sections
Current Feature Set for the Form Builder
WYSIWYG Web-based form designer
Easy-to-use data-bound form designer based around the table layout control
Server-based clipboard operations
Can cut & copy ranges, sections, fields, etc.
Forms are made up of Sections and Fields.
Excel-based notation for cell names, e.g., A1, B2, etc.
XML-based persistence
Role-based access to form fields
Controls visibility, Edit Mode, etc.
Supports Many-to-one relationships with child editing, controlled with security profiles
Real-Time Excel formula support
Separate Run-time Form Viewer, with Treeview navigation
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| Re: Web-based Form Builder For VWG |
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The link above doesn't seem to work:
The full URL is http://www.actmate.com/formengine
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| Re: Web-based Form Builder For VWG |
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Looks pretty neat. Where's the drag & drop?
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| Re: Web-based Form Builder For VWG |
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Microsoft CRM "have" a form designer "like it" (add business fields at run time) , but your Designer is much better and have great features. Using excel-based behavior is a good ideia for business forms.
Great job !
PS: I saw that you write all informations in "xml notation". Right ? Is it possible to create a Desktop-based version of your Designer ?
I would like to Integrate it as an option for "Business Form" in the Automato.
Regards,
Alexnaldo Santos
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| Re: Web-based Form Builder For VWG |
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On the topic of Drag & Drop: There may be an opportunity to add fields using a drag/drop operation, and I considered that when doing the designer. However, getting a field onto the surface is fairly easy using the right menu click, or the add field toolbar button. Most of the effort in designing forms is wiring up the data binding and setting security options, which are done using popup dialogs and the property grid.
One limitation of VWG is that there isn't any (easy) support for mouse operations like rubber-banding and sizing controls. So in my form designer, you click on an object to select it, and then use the toolbar and context menu to do actions like resizing. This is a drawback compared to how we design on the desktop, but for most of these form operations, the users are typically doing pretty basic actions against pre-designed forms. I spent a lot of time building in a server-side clipboard which lets you cut/copy/paste any of the form objects. The actual clipboard activity happens on the server, because the client doesn't really have contextual knowledge of the form elements. Clipboard operations really speed up form design because you can move and copy elements pretty quickly.
As for a desktop version: Sure.. this whole application could be done using WinForms since the controls in VWG are all derived from that environment. You would have a smoother interaction on the desktop, but there is real value in having a 100% web approach. This isn't on my roadmap for a while... I would like to see how the designer works in Silverlight, but I have been unsucessful trying to get that working on my Vista machine.
Serialization:
The form object tree is serialized to XML using the standard .Net serializer. I chose not to include any 'gizmox' namespaces in the XML structure, which allows me to deserialize the tree outside of a VWG project. This meant building a lot of mirror structures to handle properties like color, font, alignment, etc, but it does make the form structure more portable. All classes fully support both XML and Binary serialization. The binary serializer is used to support Undo operations - All edit operation push a binary copy of the active Section onto an internal stack.
Just want to point out that this form designer can easily support rendering Excel-like matrices where data is updated instantly (in other words, update one cell or field, and all dependent fields are instantly updated). That's actually a pretty neat feature and not a trivial undertaking.
Hope that makes sense.
Mitch |
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