Web-based Form Builder For VWG
We would like to share a post made by Mitch Stephens, a Visual WebGui community member about a Web-based Form Builder developed at his company for VWG:
"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:
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"