Kexi Form Templates

See also: Forms

 started: may 2005, jstaniek
 status: planning

Types of Form Templates

There are many ideas on how form templates can look like. However, essential idea is that there're two main groups of templates:

• Real autoforms. A user has a set of settings available to tweak and templates are generated on displaying -- user is unable to open a form in conventional design mode to e.g. drag a text box to other location.

The advantage here is that change of a data source's schema causes immediate update of form's layout. Other advantage is that a form design can be later used to automatically generate a web page with pretty the same look and feel.

Disadvantage: user is unable to do "anything" regarding to widget's positioning. To wipe out this disadvantage, we're allowing subforms to put inside (a subform do not need to be an autoform) and providing fairly rich set of autoform's settings.

• Generated by wizards. These are not real autoforms (no matter what MSA users tell you, MSA has no autoforms). After a form generation, user can open the form is design mode and edit it as it would be created by hand.

Advantage of this form type: obviously, user has power to tweak a form _if_ she wants to.

Disadvantage: subsequent changes to data soruce's schema have no effect in form's layout.

Main common feature of most templates is that these are procedural templates, i.e. number, source and type of database fields depends on data source user picked on creation.

Examples of Form Templates' Layout

Nice looking and usable "many fields in a single column with: labels and help text on the right hand". Fairly modern, clean, sometimes used on web pages. For larger field sets, use of vertical scrollbar is preferred here.

(a dirty copy of http://www.blogger.com/signup.g, thanks Google).