dynamic forms

[bethlakshmi]

Research what's out there for django powered dynamic form construction so that a user could add new questions to bid forms on a bid type by bid type basis.

We'd probably also want to have the forms be versionable in someway so that answers to old forms stay around, even when new forms with different questions are in use.

[burlexpo]

Looking a Django packages the strongest contender I see is Django-FOBI https://djangopackages.org/packages/p/django-fobi/ actively in production. The current version is Beta, but there may be an earlier, production ready version. It supports multiple versions of Django, has a drag and drop interface, there's a live demo of the various aspects, and there's pretty thorough documentation.

Another option is Django-Form-Bulider https://djangopackages.org/packages/p/django-forms-builder/ stable but it hasn't been updated since 2018 and no CAPTCHA integration,

[bethlakshmi]

489 just brought this back to the fore front.

Given that this is nontrivial work, I'm gonna do the work to integrate the tool here. Then figure out how to fit it into the Sign Forms flow in #489.

[bethlakshmi]

@burlexpo - I just got FOBI (your first link on this ticket) up and running. It's no longer in beta, but it does have its pluses and minuses.

I put it up on our test site. You can play with it here:

https://burlesque-expo-stage.us.aldryn.io/fobi/

I made a demo form and put it into your account.

Let's talk this afternoon (I have class 11-1, and then I'm headed back to Dorchester) - could meet up after 3?

My review so far:

• Challenge - Users can't co-edit forms. The owner of a form can edit the form. Any other user, even with privileges, can't. It CAN be co-edited in the Admin, but the admin doesn't include all the configuration settings. Changing any of that would be hard.
• Seeing the data - you can see it online, exporting it to an XLS is IMO a better view of the data. I could potentially also write a view of it.
• templates - as you can see, this whole system looks like it's part of another site. There are some ways to change the look and feel of the forms, but getting all the way to looking like most of our forms will be real work.
• it can both save to the DB (in it's own specific way) and/or send emails - it can send a confirmation mail to the user, and/or a mail with the data to any address we specify. It can do all or none of these things. I haven't played with mail yet. The test site does actively send mail, so it should work... It won't go through Post Office, so we won't see it in the DB.

If we want to integrate this with the signing system I just built: 1 - I will need to write a way to connect the "this type of user needs to sign this form" config to these forms - not too hard 2 - I will need to find a way annotate that this user is filling out this form for this conference. The "this user" part is already there. The "this conference" would be something like a hidden field... which is available, but I'll have to figure out how to make that work. - harder 3 - I need to find a way to query the form data to see who has done it, vs. who hasn't - medium hard 4 - I need to write a presentation view for users and for registration so people can see their own form data, and registration can see everyone's form data (or if they only need to see that someone signed it... that's easier). - harder 5 - we need to figure out what to do about complicated form validation - the radio button + username of payment system - I believe I can write a plugin for this, but I need to see how hard that is. - hardish

[bethlakshmi]

All that said, while the docs for this thing are sometimes frustrating, they are the most comprehensive docs of any of the sites I've seen, so this would be my pick for easiest thing to do.

And I could put some stuff on the back burner - for example, these forms don't have to look pretty right now - we could figure out how to have them look GBE-ish later.

[bethlakshmi]

Another aspect of this solution - FOBI can restrict form access to users. But that's about all it can do. It can't limit WHICH user in any way I can see (w/out me doing more work) - we can go with security by obscurity - so if we give one user the URL and don't give it to another user, theoretically, we won't get crap data.

But if, for example, we have Tina Troupe Leader who is the contact for the Delicious Duet with Suzie Someone-else, and we ask Tina to give us her payment info for tips. If Tina then helpfully shares the link for the payment info with Suzie, because she doesn't realize we tip per group, not per person, then we will have an entry from Tina and an entry from Suzie. So we need to do a bit of checking when we process this stuff.

[bethlakshmi]

Check this out!! Gave it a crack in case it helped, and doing this was quite quick:

https://burlesque-expo-stage.us.aldryn.io/submit-payment/

It's a bit fussy, but what I did was:

• integrated FOBI with Django CMS (happens in code, one time only)
• created a new page in Django CMS
• made sure to turn off the "menu" setting, so page won't be in our menu system.
• Added "FOBI Form" to the page, which let me pick the page and some other setup stuff.
• Published the page.

And now it looks way more like "our" pages. Help text and stuff is still formatted the FOBI way, but I can see how I can customize that too.

Using this trick complicates the setup a bit, I may need more when setting up the rules for who-gets-what. But I think it's worth it.

[bethlakshmi]

I may put this on hold during traveling. There's a lot of trial and error and frustration on work like this, as well as searching the interwebs for answers. With the current frustration afoot, I don't have the heart for it.

I will probably poke at things that are just satisfying for me, or so suitably easy that the gratification is candy-bar-like in it's ease of acquisition.