As part of my current work on Indicia there is a task titled “Simplification of the creation of simple recording forms in Drupal”. One of the things I could see becoming a problem with configuration of forms in Drupal was the increased dependency on writing JSON by hand in order to provide configuration for some of the more complex parts of the forms, e.g the columns config for a report grid. So, I have implemented a new control based on something called jsonwidget that lets you build JSON using a form editor rather than by hand. It uses a schema so forces you to build valid JSON that matches the available options.

I’ve committed some examples of this in action which can be found in the report_grid and report_chart prebuilt forms. If anybody has a chance to try updating from SVN and providing some feedback on whether this idea works I would be grateful for any comments. Also, please let me know any ideas for simplifying the general setup of prebuilt forms. One idea I had is to make a settings form in Drupal for the helper_config file rather than to edit this by hand and also to provide a global setting for the website ID and password so it does not have to be respecified for each form you create.

Thanks