Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Dynamic attribute generation and other assessment related questions.

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3: Re: Dynamic attribute generation and other assessment related questions. (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 05/13/04 03:06 PM
Malte,

Overall you can see that assessment is a dynamic form generation system itself.

The object level form generation code would work from an object type definition. AFAICT to make the assessment form generation work similarly, each question or possibly each survey would be an object type. So I don't think it is really possible to make them coincide.

I would not recommend putting XML into a database column to store attributes. The only way that might be wise is if you were using a standard XML format for assessments.

Besides all that, I want to recommend that you pre-generate the adp templates that will contain the forms for each survey. I don't think there is any efficient way to build a form with each question and choice stored in a different content item.

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4: Re: Dynamic attribute generation and other assessment related questions. (response to 3)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 05/13/04 06:10 PM
Dave, thanks a lot for your input.

I'm not sure if I'd have each question be an object *type*, but maybe we can catch up these days on IRC and you can tell my why you think so. But maybe this is the easiest thing to do, OTOH, university of Heidelberg wants to import 120.000 questions, not sure if we *really* want these many object types.

Concerning the pre-generation of the code, we are on the same track here. Each section of a survey will have an attribute which will hold the pre-generated adp (which might be templated manually as well).

I'd love to have inheritance of attributes like we have in an object oriented design. But I'm not sure how to best provide the necessary persistance for this.