Friday, March 9, 2012

Dynamic Field DB Schema Brainstorming

Hello -
Have a project where we are going to build a form creation application. (ASP.NET). This will allow an administrator to build a form on the fly - this form will appear on the front end of the site.
This is a fairly common thing. Are there any resources out there as to where to start designing the DB schema? I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel. Here's the basic objects I'm seeing:
Tables
Forms
FormFieldNames
FormFieldTypes
FormFieldJS
Any tips on the right direction to go?
Thanks
Rob
Try the link below and right click to download the PPT slides for datamodeling. The key to data modeling is files and associations, that means you may have fifty files but you may only have three tables based on files association. The table relationship is determined by upper and lower bound cardinality and it is not complicated. There are six complete database catalogs in the book. Hope this helps.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/mgmt/courses/mgtsand/data.html|||

Thanks for the resource, good stuff - organized nicely. I was looking specifically to my example, so I didn't plow through an ERD of what's already out there, thankx.

|||A relational database sounds like a completely inapropiate tool to build this application you're looking to build. When you are using a RDBMS, you need to know what data you are modeling. You can't just try to make it up on the fly.
You need to consider other solutions, technologies, tools. XML may be suited formatted for this -- the administrator would define an XML schema (possibly through your tool) and then build a form to input data to create XML documents that conform to the schema.
No less, any time I see anyone try to do this in a RDBMS, it falls apart in less than a year -- if it ever makes it out of development.|||

Sounds like you're both directing me the same way - a relatively small DB schema that holds the forms, the fields, and descriptive text for the fields, etc. The actual field types, values, javascript, etc... should be in a bunch of files that describe each fieldID, most likely in XML.

Thank you for that. We were thinking about compiling a bunch of .JS files for each field, and then one large.js file for the form aggregate fields. But XML would make more sense for the fields' descriptive data I believe, no?

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