Databases and Complex forms

[Charles E. Pelkey]

Hi all,

Got a question for y'all regarding the best way to maintain HUGE forms and
linking them to data tables in MySQL.

I have a set of forms that were created specifically for a Loan Services
Company (ranging from request forms to complex inspection forms with
hundreds of input fields (such as room size, item quantity, item quality and
costs) the problem I had in the initial setup was how to create the
associated data tables for each type of form. I opted to store ONLY the
client information, type of report and a few other miscellaneous items in a
table called reports and the rest of the data is dumped into an INI format
file using a php class that reads and writes ini files.

This current setup works, but not all the fields from the reports are
searchable. Additionally, going this route I had to modify all the forms and
create the associated report format (no form fields, just echoing the
correct data back where needed) and this is not user friendly enough (as if
the forms change, then the report format must change as well). Does anyone
have any recommendations on how best to modify this to use MySQL tables to
store the data without overloading the database? Or am I going about this
the wrong way???

Looking forward to your responses,
-Chalres

[Tim Van Wassenhove]

On 2003-11-08, Charles E. Pelkey <cp*****@charter.net> wrote:

Hi all,

Got a question for y'all regarding the best way to maintain HUGE forms and
linking them to data tables in MySQL.

I have a set of forms that were created specifically for a Loan Services
Company (ranging from request forms to complex inspection forms with
hundreds of input fields (such as room size, item quantity, item quality and
costs) the problem I had in the initial setup was how to create the
associated data tables for each type of form. I opted to store ONLY the
client information, type of report and a few other miscellaneous items in a
table called reports and the rest of the data is dumped into an INI format
file using a php class that reads and writes ini files.

*) First let's clean up our datastorage a little

I'd suggest you make a table (or if you have different datatypes, a
couple of tables).
dumps(dump_id,name,value);

Then you setup a table to link the dumps with the reports.
reportdumps(id,report_id,dump_id);

Now you can easily lookup all the extra data added to a report.
*) Now create a FormGenerator class (or find one on the net and adapt it
to your needs).
--
Visit my website at http://home.scarlet.be/~vwadsl
My jabber handle is aa*****@jabber.org