Some R and D, web based form builder

Every once in a while we like to sit down and work on something we've never tried before. We find most of what we do as R&D doesn't usually end in a complete project, but what we learn generally ends up integrated into a clients project. So we don't see R&D as a waste of time.

What we've done this time is tried to look at building forms in a web browser. There's many solutions out there already to do this, but in doing it yourself, you learn about some of the complications, what works well and what doesn't.

We've uploaded a short video showing what we've got so far, take a look

From the video you can see it's pretty basic, there's a limited number of elements you can add, these include a label, textbox, button, horizontal rule and a div(panel). Once you've added an element to your form, clicking it displays it's properties, and just like Microsofts Visual Studio you can change it's value, and styling to suite your needs. To position elements you can just drag them into place.

We're using position: absolute to position elements, and know that this has it's pitfalls, these being that you may have problems producing forms with a height higher than the height of the browser window. For this reason, we think this form builder might be ideal for developing iOS based forms where the screen dimensions are set in stone. If we could apply nice appealing styling to the form elements (like iOS), and provide the ability to add multiple pages, then it would be possible to build a web based form for use on an iPad whereby rather than scrolling, a back and next button would take you to the next or previous screen.

For further integration into iOS, it may be possible to develop as iOS app, that contacts a server, downloads the properties of each form element, and then dynamically creates iOS elements and positions them accordingly in the app. This way, anyone would be able to create their own data collecting web app without knowing anything about iOS.

On the other hand, our Digital CMS already collects form data and stores this in a database, could we somehow integrate the form builder into Digital CMS to allow users to create and collect their own data? It's certainly something to think about.

We'll probably add more elements like drop downs and radio buttons to the form builder, then look at how we can style the elements to hopefully product a nice usable product. 

Keep checking back for more updates on this little project.