Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The form editor - work in progress

I want to give a small preview of what the new form editor for creating dynamic and flexible forms in BeeGIS will look like. On one hand because it is coming quite nice and on the other to show to those that pay us on this (ARPA Piemonte) that we are getting closer.

Well, what would a form editor be? A tool to create forms to make surveying easier and also more standard. Once a form is defined for a certain shapefile, attributes of the features in the file can be modified in the same way by everyone through the form. I do not want to describe further here, that will be a task for the manual writers.

Let's see where we are now.

The "form language" has been defined on an xml base, so a file that looks like that



will produce a graphcial interface for feature editing like this one



This is a quite complex one and has more then one tab



Comboboxes can be described in a human readable way, while they modify the attributes with codes:




Well, yes, who would write such an xml to get a complex form? How long would it take. It took me about 2 hours to create the one I am showing here, but do not despair, we won't let users alone.

In fact there is also a form editor in progress that will make the generation of form files easy.

I will make the huge error to show you what it will more or less look like, but I also warn you that this is just a first draft prototype, things might change at least a bit.


2 comments:

cgs_bob said...

I've been looking at BeeGis to see if it can be used for our Earthquake Clearinghouse activies. So, I should eventually be able to use the forms at http://www.eeri.org/site/lfe-forms. Looking forward to trying this out with the form editor.

Yogurt Recipes said...

Loved reading thiss thank you