Rails 3: User Created custom forms?

Question

I am trying to wrap my head around how to allow a user to create custom forms with all the field types. If there is a gem that would be great, but I cannot seem to find one anyw

Answer 1

I assume you have some kind of Form model, and then some kind of Field model, and a Form has_many :fields. Correct?

Building the form is than quite straightforward: retrieve the form, iterate over all the fields, and depending on the type, render the correct code. If you use something like formtastic or simple_form the code is pretty straightforward.

But to make it work, inside your controller you will have to create a dummy object, that has a getter and setter for all fields. You could use a simple hash for this, or OpenStruct (better). While iterating over the fields set the hash with empty or default values.

I think you also want to save the results of a form? I think the easiest way is to use a model like this

t.form_id :integer
t.fields_data :text

And store the entered data in the text-field in e.g. json or something. You could also do something like

class FormData
  belongs_to :form
end

class FormDataField
  belongs_to :form_data
  belongs_to :form_field
end

while this is the cleanest (you can query on values of filled in fields for a certain form), it is maybe too much of an overhead.