Monks,

I have this project I'm going to get involved in that I'm pretty psyched about- what we're going to do is create self-service legal forms for low-income and "pro se" (self-representing) litigants to help them navigate the morass that is the US legal system.

The forms are going to require a minimal amount of logic. I want to create them in a multi-lingual "wizard" format that will make them as simple to fill out as possible.

My idea is that a client will have a menu of forms to choose from, and will probably be referred to the proper "wizard" by either searching our site or directly by an advocate. They'll fill out a multi-screen interview, at the end of which they'll have a plain HTML or PDF file returned to them that they can print and bring to court.

Anyway, I've been evaluating a few different options for creating these forms, and the best so far appears to be CGI::FormMagick. It's multi-lingual, uses XML to store form creation data, has built-in validation routines and is easily extended for new routines, and seems very close to being exactly what I want.

My questions:

  1. If you've used CGI::FormMagick, how did you like it? Kudos, pitfalls, annoyances?
  2. Are there other modules out there I should look at?

I want to avoid hand-rolling a solution, though if I did I'd probably do something with cpan:://CGI::Application, subclassing different modules I created as I needed.

The major drawback to CGI::FormMagick, as I see it, is that it doesn't have a lot of "look and feel" customizability (if that's a word. . .), but we can get by only with CSS if this is going to give us the functionality we need.

Thanks brethren. . .

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.

Fixed title 2002-02-14 by dvergin per user request

In reply to CGI::FormMagick for a "Document Assembly" system by Hero Zzyzzx

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