Processing forms with tons of fields, AJAX, and other things to make life simple...what can we do about it?

[Vineet Sawant]

Hello,

I've been using ProcessWire for over a year now. It's wonderful to work with ProcessWire and enjoy the freedom it provides.

I've used PW for tons of projects and now I've started using it for much complex projects such as invoicing applications and PM tools.

The only problem I've faced so far is creating public side forms with tons of fields that need validation and processing.

I've been doing it manually, writing jQuery validations, form processors and then using PW's API to store information coming from client side.

It works but takes a lot of time. A friend of mine uses Drupal, he seems to be able to create client side application of same sort without having to manually process any form, with AJAX support too.

I'm not complaining in anyway. I'm well aware that PW has a very strong backend that works just like(for me, even better than) Drupal. But it can't be given to public/client to use for doing form related works.

I'm interested in knowing how others are handling this and what I'm doing wrong exactly? Have I missed something?

I'm just looking to find a way to make forms processing less and less manual. Like I'll just create a template with set of fields, and some way to have a form of those fields created. Just like it happens at admin side.

Thanks.

[Pete]

I've been thinking about the same thing to be honest for a while.

Some way of creating fields that aren't necessarily fields in the normal sense (so save field info to JSON array, no db tables) and store the template as JSON as well would be great. Just a simple form helper that doesn't have a backend or tables and you can then do what you want with the submitted information.

That might sound a but like Formbuilder but there are scenarios where Formbuilder isn't the tool I need (plenty where it is though).

[Vineet Sawant]

Thanks Pete.

 so save field info to JSON array, no db tables

Are you talking about form serialization? That sounds like a cool concept that I should learn more about.

Also, I've been reading few forum posts about using admin panel on public side. Is there anyway we can use admin panel with some more customization?

Like there are times when field depends the input of the previous one. I'm not sure how can that be done on admin side.

For example, in my invoicing system, when person is adding new client, he selects country, based on selected country, next field shows list of states, this goes same for cities and locality.

Can we achieve something like this in admin panel? Even achieving this will help a lot and will reduce lots of work.

EDIT: link updated with a better example!

Edited June 22, 2014 by Vineet Sawant