I would like to ask for your opinion in creating a solution for the following application requirements. The general purpose of the application is to administrate students, teachers and courses much like a school administration software.
Some content-types will have related forms (original format is PDF) that are filled in partially by the user and partially by the application. After filling in the required data, the forms must be printable (PDF) and stored for future editing and printing again. The filled form must always stay related to a specific parent node. Means, if the user views or edits the content of a certain node, he needs to see the related forms and be able to click on them to fill in data or edit or print the filled in form again and again.
A small example.
Content-type: student (node)
- related form: attendance
- related form: enrollment
Properties of the related forms:
- original forms are available as PDF files
- some fields are filled in programmatically, taking data from the currently viewed student node
- other fields are filled in manually by the user
- filled in forms need to be printable (PDF) or send as mail attachment
- filled in forms need to be stored for future printing / editing
- forms always need to be related with their parent student node
My targeted solution is as follows using as example the form "attendance":
- programmatically create and validate the form "attendance"
- store the filled form as a PDF file in the file system
- add the PDF as attachment to the related student node
- add an edit button beside the attachment that leads the user to the filled form (for editing and printing again)
Could this solution work? Does anybody have ideas or hints for a better solution? Any comments are very appreciated.