Intergrating webtop and forms builder

I am a relatively new webtop developer. We are currently using d5 sp5 but we will soon be migrating to d6 sp5. I am currently assigned to rewrite a webtop project. The business community designed an excel spreasheet with macros which are stored in a folder. The folder type has properties which designate membership for the financial spreadsheet. When it is created it stores the object id of the parent folder which is used later in a dql statement for reporting. Each line is financial record containing about 20 fields which include dates, money amounts and text. There is a nightly process that reads any of these files that were created or modified that day and converts it to xml and ftps it to a downstream system. The users are now discussing adding more fields and macros to the existing spreadsheet. Personally I don't find this system very useful. I have read that forms can be created in forms builder and integrated into webtop. My thought was that either a single form could be created that allows multiple instances of a new type which is represented by each line in the spreadsheet or if that's not feasible have the form represent the fields in a single line of the spreadsheet and have the user create multiple instances.

My question is threefold.

Is what I am proposing a feasible and hopefully more user friendly alternative. If so is there good documentation with examples on how to create forms and integrate them with a webtop application so a user could create, read, update and delete the form which would be attached to an underlying doctype that could be used for reporting. If the answer to the previous 2 questions is yes should I be creating the forms in d6 sp5 or update the current app in d5 sp5 and then convert it.

I hope my questions are clear. Any help would be appreciated

Larry

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Comments

mszurap

Hi,

Webtop is already integrated with Webtop.

The only thing you have to do is to design a form in Forms Builder (there you can design the user interface and create/extend your object type, thus defining the data storage rules: which form field goes into which attribute), validate it, install it. After that you can create new form instances of that form definition from Webtop. The data can go into your custom object type's attributes, so you can make reports on these.

The only drawback is that printing your form (if needed) is not so pretty as it is from Excel. That's your decision.

sharkbob

Thank for your response.

I assume you meant to say Forms Builder is integrated with Webtop

I have been doing a little research. One thing I am a little confused about is what kind of form template to use. Would I use an electronic form or a Document View template. My intent would be to have the form instances ( is that some kind of contentless document ?) available in the folder and the users could use the forms to update and delete doctype instances or create new ones from the file menu. I am assuming that I could associate a doctype with the form so I could do dql queries on it. Do I have that right? We are in the process of migrating to d6.5 sp1 so I suspect I would be better off porting my app to the new docabse and build the forms and creating the associated sbo with d6.5 tools?

Again, thanks for your help.

Larry