Technologies for multiple-question application form.
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I work for a state agency that has a multiple page, multiple question application form. Because the application centers around eligibility for a payoff, there are different paths that an applicant may take through the application. For instance, depending upon their answers, they may only need to fill out one or two pages of questions, but could conceivably need to fill out more pages depending upon whether or not further information is required. What sort of approach/technology would be ideal to handing this sort of thing in .NET? Currently, it is handled in a very clumsy manner involving multiple .aspx pages and a lot of unnecessary, hard-coded session variables and logic checks. In this environment it's easy for things to become unnecessarily complicated, and changes to a single question might require changes in multiple places throughout the application (especially to database calls). One method I was thinking of would be a single .aspx page with a multiview control backed by XML files for each page of questions where the questions are given attributes that define what type of question they are (i.e. yes/no, checkbox, text), as well as the name they are to be given in the database (i.e. "absence_eligibility1"), but I am unsure of the best way to implement the dependencies. Any ideas?
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I work for a state agency that has a multiple page, multiple question application form. Because the application centers around eligibility for a payoff, there are different paths that an applicant may take through the application. For instance, depending upon their answers, they may only need to fill out one or two pages of questions, but could conceivably need to fill out more pages depending upon whether or not further information is required. What sort of approach/technology would be ideal to handing this sort of thing in .NET? Currently, it is handled in a very clumsy manner involving multiple .aspx pages and a lot of unnecessary, hard-coded session variables and logic checks. In this environment it's easy for things to become unnecessarily complicated, and changes to a single question might require changes in multiple places throughout the application (especially to database calls). One method I was thinking of would be a single .aspx page with a multiview control backed by XML files for each page of questions where the questions are given attributes that define what type of question they are (i.e. yes/no, checkbox, text), as well as the name they are to be given in the database (i.e. "absence_eligibility1"), but I am unsure of the best way to implement the dependencies. Any ideas?
Depending on how much time you are planning to invest in this, it may be more cost effective to get an off-the-shelf solution that can handle this type of skip logic. These types of product range in price from hundreds to thousands of dollars. *DISCLAIMER* I am the architect for a company that produces this type of software, but there are many options so you might want to check around. I can tell you from first hand experience that once you get into conditional logic and/or have to create and deploy multiple questionnaires you've got quite a bit of work to do.