Working With Rails

Well, Rails is a web framework. As such it is geared at delivering browser based solutions rather than any other format. That doesn’t mean you can’t just have an intranet running on an internal server to do just what you’re describing however.

I would take a very simple approach and just create my form with XHTML/CSS in the view, save the submissions to the database and use ActionMailer to email it to me as well, then use the to_xml method to dump the entries in the database to XML format as needed and do whatever is desired with the results (save to a file, feed to a web service, email again, whatever).

So in short, you could do this with Rails!

I don’t think Rails is suited to this – at the very least even with an internal itnranet solution, users will have to open IE to view the form.

Sounds like you need something like PDF forms or even word documents.

If the people are on Outlook/Exchange, you can write a VBA app that will display custom email reply form inside Outlook.

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Toby Hede
www.finitestatemachine.com
Software Development for Social Networks

The quick answer is “yes you can, but it’s probably overkill”.

IMO you’d be better off writing a single quick page of PHP to just send you the results of the form. Solutions of this sort are available to cut’n’paste all over the web.

That being said – you may have other reasons for implementing a rails-based solution – eg if you intend to add more functionality to the site at a later date, or just wnat an excuse to play with it ;)

Still – I agree with the others. If being offline is really required – just provide a .doc to copy, or a list of “required fields” or even an email-template that they can download onto their hardrive and use to fill in the blanks each time.