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Branching forms
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Description

Here's some background and somewhat similar bug reports:

Nested forms:
http://old.nabble.com/Nested-Forms-to32052038.html

Limited nesting form capability:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30011

Redirected form:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10973

I think a general solution to many of the features needed by users of Semantic Forms would be branching forms.

A single form begins the process. Data is entered by the user, and that data is used for decision-making. Then the user (and optionally the data) is sent to one of several possible forms, perhaps dynamically generated using further decision making, or from several pre-made forms to be combined into one.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz30536

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.Nov 21 2014, 11:52 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz30536.

Forgot to add this bug as a related one, for a use case of ensuring a property is unique:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30537

Also, I think the code for this bug/enhancement should be handled in SF_FormLinker.php, correct? I'm not at all familiar with the SF code, but if that's correct, then I'll at least know I'm on the right track for studying it.

I'm not sure that I'll come up with a solution, but that's always a possible consequence of study.

Combining multiple forms in some sort of workflow strikes me as a bad idea - setting this to "wontfix". If you want to discuss this idea in greater length, the mailing list is probably a better place for it.

Actually, I believe something very similar to this can already be done with Special:RunQuery, simply by using the RunQuery forms to populate a template and conditionally present additional forms. The critical component of this enhancement was forwarding data to additional forms without needing to create temporary pages to hold the data.

All of my tests so far indicate that Special:RunQuery can do this. I need to write up some documentation that shows how this can be done, if you don't get to it before I do. I wanted to do some more testing before marking this as "WONTFIX", but the bugs I ran into have temporarily stopped my testing of the "branching forms" application of Special:RunQuery.

So, in short, I agree with marking this as WONTFIX, and unless I run into something fundamental that prevents that usage, I don't think we'll need to revisit this.

Thanks Yaron.