Posted by Luke on 05/19/06 19:52

Hello Erwin!

I understand what you're saying and I agree with you. Yet I doubt if it
could work that way. We don't have 20 people that could work on this
project. Database structure is to be designed by me and I wish I could
design a very good structure but... not given several forms like this a
month! There is just not enough time to create a framework/structure
cabable of storing all dropdown values in a table(s). I do realize the
drawbacks of my approach (female=1, male=2 , what if that changes in
the future?) but I'm in charge of this project and it's my
responsibility to take care of that. We've had some Perl/CGI portals in
production for a few years and that was never an issue.
Fortunately, once a form is designed It's not likely that it will
change (since all of this forms have been in use for years as the paper
ones. They are standarized and approved by many organizations). This
project is just bigger that than others we've done so far and might be
the first one to go with PHP.

I consider myself an advanced Perl programmer and I have written
hundreds of scripts helping me with parsing HTML. But then is a
validation/testing stage and the more complex the structure, the more
time it takes. I have enough work with just naming those fields, what I
get from the clinical folks is a list of field names: F1, F2, F3,
F1000. And no script will help me to come up with some reasonable
html/database names. Then goes javascripts, CGI processing, and so on.
1000 fields means:

1000 html names, 1000 sql names, 1000 javascript checks, 1000 cgi
variables, 1000 server-side validations,...

As I wrote I found a great Perl module which does the job with filling
in a form:

http://search.cpan.org/~tjmather/HTML-FillInForm-1.06/lib/HTML/FillInForm.pm

I hope there is a PHP equivalent of that!

Best regards and thanks!
Luke

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