Hello,
I would like to create a framework for implementing wizards. The
wizards will be driven from entries that are contained within a
database. For example a "questions" table would hold all the questions
for a wizard, adding more entries to the question table would add more
questions to the wizard without any coding required. The situation
must also cater for multiple wizards which will all have different
questions.
My question is has anyone come across this situation before and could
lend a few pointers or even if there is a framework already available
to do this sort of this?
Regards.
I have personally, and I know of several other developers, who have
had a requirement - and I have not (yet) found a suitable 'generic'
solution.
For example, in one case, the questions asked depended upon the
answers to previous questions (so, for example, a response of "Female"
to sex would ask the female-only questions, such as "are you
pregnant') this leads to a requirement of a different design to a more
simple 'ask these questions on this page then go onto the next'.
validation is also sometimnes required to be more complex - I have
developed one model where it was necessary to validate questions based
on the previous repsonses to other questions (e.g. if they enter their
birth date I need to calculate their age, and only ask certain
questions if they are over 18)
And _that's_ just the tip of the iceberg - and only touches on
questions - you also need to store the answers!
And the design of the answer DB can be very complex - and also changes
requirements depending on the use. For simple situations, each answer
can appear on a row by itself, the index of the row being some unique
identifier identifying the person answering the question, together
with the question number. But this desiugn does not lend itself to
reporting very easily (I have used a data warehousing style solution
to get arouhd that one)
Another method I have used is to design the answer table with a large
number of columns, named 'Answer1, Answer2 etc. Using a cross-
reference table, I map a question to an answer column and thus derive
the 'real name' of that column. This speeds up reporting at runtime,
but requires a front-end to show the user which column is the answer
to which question.
I hope that gives you some ideas! I guess, what I am saying is that
you need to think about the requirements carefully before doing
initial design work - and to check on any frameworks/packages out
there that appear to do what you want, as my experience has shown
that none that I could find gave me what the customer required.
