In part of my requirements for this project I am working on in Appian is to allow admins of the application be able to dynamically add fields and forms from the backoffice interface for users to access and submit their responses to the dynamically generated forms. I have looked everywhere online for the answer but have found little to no information on the topic. All I found was a plugin, however I am precluded from utilizing plugins in this specific project, and as such, must be developed entirely on Appian without plugins. Can this be achieved?
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
Can you share more details of that use case? What exactly is that dynamic behaviour and how do you plan to manage these dynamic data sets.
If you are talking about giving capabilities to create forms to end user. yes, it is possible in Appian.
Maybe what you need is a dynamic form generator?
Yes, how would one approach implementation?
How would it be implemented?
The admin needs to be able to create fields (text, dropdown, number, date, etc.) from a backoffice site, and the user of the form sees the fields created by the admin and can fill them in and be stored in the database.
It's a complicated approach, one suggestion would be to implement a dynamic interface where the user can create the controls (this is the form generator).
THe form created , will be persisted in a data structure (for example a record, or a json), and after that another interface will iterate over that information in order to create the form for the user. This structure must contains all the information for control the behaviour of the controls defined.
Keep in mind, that you have to be carefull with the performance, because you will have to iterate over that structure, and you will have to deal with a huge amount of information.
Would the data structure need to be predefined? I need the data to be dynamic as well.
In my experience, trying to implement such on top of Appian is a very painful endeavour. Appian is just to made for such a use case.
I strongly recommend to stay with the normal way applications are built. Have a developer set up data model, forms and process, and get that deployed.
It depends, because different user controls may have different properties..... YOu can use a maximal containing all the properties , or create a metadata structure.