Posting variable data

I am building an application in ASP.NET, C#, MVC3 and SQL Server 2008.

A form is presented to a user to fill out (name, email, address, etc). I would like to allow the admin of the application to add extra, dynamic questions to this form.

The amount of extra questions and the type of data returned will vary. For instance, the admin could add 0, 1 or more of the following types of questions:

1. Have you a full, clean driving liscence?
2. Rate your drivings skills from 1 to 5.
3. Describe the last time you went on a long journey?
4. etc ...

Note, that the answers provided could be binary (Q.1), integer (Q.2) or free text (Q.3).

How would I allow the posting of 0, 1 or more random values from the form back to my code?

Any help would be greatly appriecated.

Thanks in advance.

PS. I asked a similar question regarding the storing of thi开发者_StackOverflow中文版s data in sql, see here

You will need to use an EAV scheme for storage. For a discussion of the topic, along with common pitfalls and solutions, see Best Practices for Semantic Data Modeling for Performance and Scalability. Other alternatives are Sparse Columns and XML data type column, but I think EAV is superior most of the times.

You'll have to accomplish this using dynamic controls.

Basically you'll read the question list from your database, inject zero or more custom controls to emit the question(s) and accept the answer(s). Probably wrapped in a repeater.

On post back you'll have to rehydrate the dynamic controls so that you can get the values.

I have done this before when I worked on a survey tool.

So first of all you need to decide what questions type you'll have. I had SingleOption, MultiOption and FreeText type questions.

User logs into the admin screen and selects a type of question he wants to add. He then clicks on Add button, which submits a request to a controller/web service.

Controller looks at type of question and adds a record into the database.

Rough table structure below:

QuestionID | SurveyId | QuestionTypeId 2 4 1

This is your basic structure.

When you generate an interface for answering questions, you will retrieve all questions with a SurveyId = 4.

You will then write an HTML helper that looks at question type and generates an appropriate control.

When it comes to submitting a survey, or answers to your question, you will display all questions and answer fields in some div, say we call it "survey_questions". Inside this div will be a form which will contain all your questions and controls for answers (text inputs, checkboxes etc).

You will then submit this form through jQuery to a controller/web service. Controller/Web Service will read survey id and it will iterate through all submitted values.

You will then use these values to populate a table for storing survey results. I understand that this is very brief and abstract, but I have worked over a month on this, so if this is useful and you need further help, then please ask.

I found a great article that solves my problem. You can find it here