A Lightweight Approach to Flexible Form Generation

Abstract

Business activities often rely on data collection and processing facilities, such as completion and analysis of forms. Especially, when mobile devices are used to collect and process data, a lightweight, flexible, and portable approach is needed to ensure that digital forms can be provided on a variety of smart phones and tablets. In this paper, we describe a lightweight approach to flexible generation of digital forms. The presented approach relies on standard Web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These technologies are enhanced by a new Form Description Language (FDL) that is used to define the structure of forms. The supported elements of FDL are based on HTML user interface elements to ensure portability across different Web browsers. Moreover, the FDL-based form descriptions utilize JSON as foundation. Thus, the size of the forms can be considerably decreased. The proposed approach was evaluated by comparing various safety-related forms.