plugin architecture - repost

[Craig Buchanan]

I am building an application to help researcher record the outcomes of their
studies. These outcomes are document across a number of paper forms. The
information documented on these forms varies widely.

My current approach is to use a Document class with a collection of Question
classes. I create an instance of the Document, add a number of questions to
it, serialize the Document object to XML, then treat this XML file as a
'template'. I've created a number of these 'template' files. When I want
to use a specific template, I open the XML file, deserialize it, add data to
it, serialize it, then save the xml to a datasource associated w/ the study.

I started researching Plugsin and thought this architecture might provide a
more tight-bound solution. Essentially, each template is a plugin. The
sticking point is how to define and save a collection of Question classes
with the plugin.

I'd appreciate hearing others thoughts on these approaches.

Thanks,

Craig Buchanan