How to allow users to create or edit web forms within a Spring MVC web application?

We would like to provide our users with a limited set of drag-n-drop fields so they could manage template web forms in an application. The admins would define these templates and the users would enter some data up front which would determine which template they would be shown.

Is there a framework or 开发者_运维知识库some things I could check out on how to do this?

We use Spring MVC 3 as our web layer and that would drive our solution.

Thanks! E

---

I don't know of any frameworks (that would play nicely with Spring MVC 3) that would do what you are describing and the fact that there are no answers after 5 days also suggests this.

Although you could write such a thing yourself, it sounds like a very big and complex undertaking. You might be able to use a Javascript framework like YUI or ExtJS to handle some of the custom form generation but that tends to be client focussed so you then have an issue of persisting the custom form for other users.

In my organisation we use WordPress with the "Contact Form 7" plugin to do just what you describe. Non-coders can create forms in the WP admin interface and when submitted, it results in a custom email which then gets processed by a human or has a link in it that auto-populates params for a custom webapp (that is scary and has many form fields).

My gut feeling is that although the stake holders think they need unlimited variations of forms, they may only really need a few variations of those forms. It might be a lot easier to simply code up a handful of different pages/forms and then have a leading form which takes the user to the form they need.

Also the use of Jquery hide/show can be very useful in hiding optional elements and thus reducing the negative impact of a very complex form in terms of UX (user experience/usability). E.g. the questions the users gets asked can then lead to some form elements being hidden/shown on the page, using Javascript.