dynamic web forms

Question

I'm developing a web application that allows reports to be written and viewed online. These reports will have the structure of a typical school report or annual employee appraisal report. I would like the user to be able to customise the structure of their report. For example, one school might want a report in the format

Subject   Comment       Score
-----------------------------
English   He sucks      20% 
Maths     He rocks      88%
Science   About average 70%

whereas another might want

Subject   Grade
---------------
English     A
Maths       B
Science     C

What I'm looking for is a way for each school to specify the format of their reports - possibly some kind of JavaScript form-building library. Such a library could be used in a page that allows the uses to build a form which would be used as a template for their reports.

As I'll need to process each report submitted on the server-side, I'll need to capture some semantics about each field. For example, it would be great if the user could specify whether the answer to each question on the report should be plain text, a numerical score, a checkbox, radio buttons, etc

Any suggestions about useful technologies for handling such "dynamic" forms would be really appreciated. XForms looks like it might be relevant, but I haven't dug into it too deeply yet.

Cheers, Don

Answer 1

A very nice XForms based form builder, (LGPL) http://www.orbeon.com/

You can check out their form builder demo here: http://www.orbeon.com/ops/fr/orbeon/builder/summary/