Using Grails for online surveys

[peter foley]

First does anyone know if grails is being used to develop online surveys?
Second how hard would it be to add to the domain model survey related annotations such as sequencing (if answer to question 5 is yes, goto question 7 etc), extra text (e.g. question text, help information), layout (e.g. horizontal rather than vertical)? Is this the sort of thing you put in a plugin?

Our vision is to create the domain model(s) from our existing survey development systems (which are focused on paper forms) that would then generate an online web app.

[Stephan M. February]

----- "peter foley" <peter.foley@...> wrote:
> First does anyone know if grails is being used to develop online
> surveys?
> Second how hard would it be to add to the domain model survey related
> annotations such as sequencing (if answer to question 5 is yes, goto
> question 7 etc), extra text (e.g. question text, help information),
> layout
> (e.g. horizontal rather than vertical)? Is this the sort of thing you
> put in
> a plugin?

What you are describing is a workflow system. Have a look at JBPM (http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm). AFAIK there is no JBPM plugin for Grails.

An alternative is to make use of Grails' Webflow (http://grails.org/WebFlow).

Regards
Stephan February
Adeptiva Linux Pte Ltd
Co. Reg: 200404633R



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[Peter Ledbrook-2]

> What you are describing is a workflow system. Have a look at JBPM (http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm). AFAIK there is no JBPM plugin for Grails.

True, but there is GrailsFlow:

  http://www.jcatalog.com/oss/grailsflow/

But I think WebFlow (as described in the user guide) is probably
sufficient for a survey application.

Cheers,

Peter

--
Software Engineer
G2One, Inc.
http://www.g2one.com/

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[hartsock]

We were looking at web-flows on a previous project.
http://grails.org/WebFlow

... but we went a different route and wrote simple rules.

I have an Audit Logging plugin which can add onChange event handlers to an object. I'll be using the handlers to generate new "todo" objects for a user based on their answers/values in the domain object. The value of the answer creates a different task to complete... I could imagine kludging together something that did created navigation objects that directed you to a next step based on your answers... You would have a controller that would search an authenticated user's name for uncompleted "Question" objects and display them and onChange you would create new survey objects or "you're done" objects ...

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GRAILS/Grails+Audit+Logging+Plugin

... but that's not a very artistic way to solve your particular problem. Actually, I almost deleted that paragraph because it feels so wrong to even suggest it. But, I'm understandably fixated right now I just invented a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

I think you'd probably like to use web-flows. Yeah, go learn about them. Definitely.

peter foley wrote:

First does anyone know if grails is being used to develop online surveys?
Second how hard would it be to add to the domain model survey related annotations such as sequencing (if answer to question 5 is yes, goto question 7 etc), extra text (e.g. question text, help information), layout (e.g. horizontal rather than vertical)? Is this the sort of thing you put in a plugin?

Our vision is to create the domain model(s) from our existing survey development systems (which are focused on paper forms) that would then generate an online web app.

[Marc Palmer Local]

On 22 Apr 2008, at 01:42, peter foley wrote:

>
> First does anyone know if grails is being used to develop online  
> surveys?
> Second how hard would it be to add to the domain model survey related
> annotations such as sequencing (if answer to question 5 is yes, goto
> question 7 etc), extra text (e.g. question text, help information),  
> layout
> (e.g. horizontal rather than vertical)? Is this the sort of thing  
> you put in
> a plugin?
>
> Our vision is to create the domain model(s) from our existing survey
> development systems (which are focused on paper forms) that would then
> generate an online web app.

This is not such an easy problem to solve. We have hit it a little  
with online surveys for our branded sites using Grails.

I would say that actually the most sane way is to have each question  
as a domain class and have these relate to a single survey submission,  
and use flows to control the logic between question pages -but this is  
no good if you want to show multiple questions on a form at the same  
time. To do that you'll have to use some custom JS code that has  
knowledge of your rules for question filling.

You could create your own trivial DSL on the server to code up these  
rules into data, and externalise this data as JSON trivially in your  
model so that JS code can access the information.

Marc


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[peter foley]

Thanks. Had a quick look at webflow (it is a basic workflow system). It looks like it might be suitable for one of our modes of operation where each question is on a seperate screen. Yes?
but not for a multiple questions per screen scenario.

I suppose I could change the grails templates to generate XForms rather than HTML?
How hard is it to add annotations to the domain model?

Stephan M. February wrote:

----- "peter foley" <[e-mail]> wrote:
> First does anyone know if grails is being used to develop online
> surveys?
> Second how hard would it be to add to the domain model survey related
> annotations such as sequencing (if answer to question 5 is yes, goto
> question 7 etc), extra text (e.g. question text, help information),
> layout
> (e.g. horizontal rather than vertical)? Is this the sort of thing you
> put in
> a plugin?

What you are describing is a workflow system. Have a look at JBPM (http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm). AFAIK there is no JBPM plugin for Grails.

An alternative is to make use of Grails' Webflow (http://grails.org/WebFlow).

Regards
Stephan February
Adeptiva Linux Pte Ltd
Co. Reg: 200404633R



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