Kexi/Plugins/AutoForms
AutoForms are not implemented in KEXI but will be very useful.
History
- 2005: There was old code in plugins/autoforms/ directory in Kexi 0.x quickly disabled
- 2005: Form Templates/Wizards discussion started by ccpasteur, jstaniek
- 2014: plugins/autoforms/ removed in Sep in Kexi 2.9. Original maintainer was Adam Pigg.
Introduction
- For a quick introduction to AutoForms see this find a book or tutorial for MS Access.
To automate forms creation, one needs some sort of template that can be used to generate the form when only input data source and certains form configuration/parameters are available.
There are several approaches to form templates. Two main approaches can be identified: real AutoForms and forms generated by an assistant.
AutoForms
Real AutoForms. A user access to certain settings provided by a template, visual or behavioral. There is no generation of physical form that can be later edited by the in the Design view. Instead the user can further alter the settings later.
The advantage here is that change of a data source's schema causes immediate update of form's layout. Other advantage is that a form design can be later used to automatically generate a web page with pretty the same look and feel. Disadvantage: user is unable to do "anything" regarding to widget's positioning. To wipe out this disadvantage, we're allowing subforms to put inside (a subform do not need to be an autoform) and providing fairly rich set of autoform's settings.
Forms generated by an assistant
These forms can't be called "real" AutoForms because after the form generation, user ordinary form is generated. Then it can be open the Design view and edited as it would be created by hand from scratch by the user.
Advantage of this form type: obviously, user has power to tweak a form _if_ she wants to. Disadvantage: subsequent changes to data soruce's schema have no effect in form's layout. Main common feature of most templates is that these are procedural templates, i.e. number, source and type of database fields depends on data source user picked on creation.