What are some possible designs to deal with frequently changing data forms?
I have a basic CRUD web application where the main data entry form changes yearly. So each record should be tied to a specific version of the form. This requirement is kind of new, so the existing application was not built with this in mind.
I’m looking for different ways of handling this, hoping to avoid future technical debt. Here are some options I’ve come up with:
- Create a new object, UI and set of tables for each version. This is obviously the most naive approach.
- Keep adding all the fields to the same object and DB tables, but show/hide them based on the form version. This will become a mess after a few changes.
- Build form definitions, then dynamically build the UI and store the data as some dictionary like format (e.g. JSON/XML or maybe an document oriented database) I think this is going to be too complex for the scope of this app, especially for the UI.
What other possibilities are there? Does anyone have experience doing this? I’m looking for some design patterns to help deal with the complexity.
For this particular app, we decided to deal with the problem as if there was one form that continuously grows. Due to the nature of the form this seemed more natural than more explicit separation. We will have a mapping of year->field for parts of the application that do need to know which data is for which year.
For the UI, we will be creating a new page for each year’s form. Dynamic form creation is far too complex in this situation.