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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T07:15:39+00:00

We have a submission form and an administration for the submissions, with the ability

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We have a submission form and an administration for the submissions, with the ability to view, edit, delete and export.

Using Oracle, the submissions are stored in a table, there is a log table to stored changes and two sequences to populate the ids.

When a new form is requested, the code the tables and the sequences are duplicated renamed and modified to meet the new the requirements.

Due to time constraints I’ve been trying to improve the process a little at a time, I would like to stop populating the database with so many tables.

The most powerful solution would be to have a form builder that would allow you to define the fields and build the forms using this metadata. I’ve seen examples of this in the Mura CMS, but I’ve not yet found a standalone solution I could integrate. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel if I can help it.

As an intermediate solution I’m toying with the idea of storing each submission as an XML file, not a very scalable solution – but with approximately 30 submissions per form about 1-2 administrators I don’t think it would be too slow.

If anyone knows of a form builder I can use, that I can integrate with ColdFusion?
Or whether the XML intermediate solution is something I should consider?

I’d appreciate some input!

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could easily abstract this if you don’t need to join the data between these tables. Essentially build a survey tool. Depending on the level of abstraction you want, you could even allow the user to pick pre-existing or common form fields (such as email address, address, city etc.)

    Form (FormID, Title, CreateDate, Active)
    FormField (FormFieldID, Name, DataType, Required)
    FormSubmission (FormSubmissionID, FormID, SubmissionDate, IPAddress)
    FormData (FormSubmissionID, FormFieldID, Data)

    You could expand this to include validation options, max length, and support data types if necessary.

    There are probably projects that replicate this:

    http://soundings.riaforge.org/

    http://postit.riaforge.org/

    (there are more form-based utilities on RIAForge)

    but I haven’t used either to give you an informed opinion. I don’t recommend the XML route, use db tables + abstraction.

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