Measurement sheets in Drupal 6

I'm doing a project开发者_JAVA技巧 for a surveying company in Drupal 6. Ultimately, employees will need to enter measurements into a new content type. Currently they do it in a big Excel spreadsheet that has a bunch of macros to do calculations between cells (Meters to Feet, m^2, some pricing stuff).

My question is: How would one go about replicating the functionality of this spreadsheet best in Drupal 6, keeping in mind the amount of data the employees using this system gather varies between projects (I.e., 3-floor house versus 1-floor with basement; etc.).

I have two ideas so far:

1. Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Sheetnode's CCK functionality to drop Sheetnode CCK fields to replicate the spreadsheet exactly. Use Views to display this data other ways.

2. Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Views (and possibly something like Views Calc) to get varying measurement values.

That said, I'm completely open to suggestions outside of these two implementations.

Thank you!

I dont have an answer so much as a caution. I did a project where a number of pieces of content were rendered simultaneously on a page, each piece being in its own node. The down side to multiple nodes is the performance hit you will take having at least one (possibly complex) query per node.

So in this case, if there were many many lines in the sheet, and each line was a node, you might take a pretty heavy performance knock.

This might be acceptable - but I thought I'd give you the heads up.

This might be one of those times where its best to actually create a purpose-built mechanism on-top of the Drupal API instead of using nodes+CCK.

Like I said, I could be being over cautious. It depends on your exact usecase.

HTH!

This seems like the kind of question http://drupal.stackexchange.com was made for...

I ended up doing this with jQuery, Measured Value Field and Flexinode; see: Auto-updating width/length/area using jQuery and Drupal6