Re: [SAGE] web form handling software

[Philip Brown <phil@bolthole.com>]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 02:42:46PM -0500, John Stoffel wrote:
> 
> Philip> Would anyone have a recommendation for free, or at minimum
> Philip> cheap (to universities) software, for handling web forms?
> ...
> 
> 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?  

Yes I think so.

But does that really allow me to now evaluate a product? Please name one,
if so :-)



> 
> 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? 

At this point, I'll take ANY fulfilment of this description. even if it's
as trivial as "saves it to a directory somewhere, in some format that can
be reasonably read".

[hi ex-CT folks!]


Saving into a database would be the ultimate. but I'm not holding my
breath.




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

It cant be that bad. Some webhosting companies already have 100% HTTP
"create/edit your own web pages" web front ends. And some of them seem
reasonable.
(Trouble is, they're all custom to that ISP)

Possibly even a "wiki" style of editing would be acceptible.
eg: okay, still kinda in a "text editor", but the syntax is not like
HTML or perl or ...
dokuwiki has the following format for tables, for example:


^header1 ^header2 ^header3 ^
|col1    | col2   | col3   |


I think even a non-techie could deal with that :-)

f