“A form is a living, breathing transactional document that interacts with users and information and systems across the enterprise. Today more than 80% of the processes in public and private businesses depend on forms. In each case the form is what initiates the process, it’s the vehicle that drives the process through its lifecycle and that kicks off other related processes, and it’s the surviving record of all approvals and transactions once the process is complete.” Paul Chan, IBM

OpenRules Dialogs and Forms
Contrary to traditional Web development techniques oriented to software developers only, OpenRules allows business analysts to become active participants in the Web development process.  A non-technical user can implement and maintain complex Web Application and related interaction logic using simple Excel tables only. OpenRules supports rules-based interaction process modeling with a quick and intuitive GUI.  It provides tools and methodology to define and maintain the frequently changing business and presentation logic of complex interaction processes. The simplest way to create and maintain rules-based web applications is to use OpenRules Dialog. This is a high-level tool that allow you to build web-based questionnaires.

This section provides an overview of OpenRules Forms, a  low-level tools that was used to create OpenRules Dialog and allows you to add your own layouts not covered by OpenRules Dialog.  Click here to read detailed documentation about OpenRules Forms.  The links below will walk you through concrete OpenRules Forms examples:

Sample "ClinicalGuidelines"  
Sample "LoanDynamics"
Dynamic Interaction Processes 

Excel as a Web GUI Editor
With OpenRules, a non-technical user can implement dynamic web-based interaction processes by defining complex Web forms and the associated interaction logic in simple Excel tables.  When used as a web GUI editor, Excel allows a user to define complex web page layouts in a WYSIWYG manner without knowledge of HTML, JScript, etc.  However, experts can always add more programming details directly to Excel-based forms and decision tables.

Layout Spreadsheets
Forms drawn in MS Excel spreadsheets are automatically translated into HTML pages without limitations on the expressiveness of HTML.  A non-technical user can define web page layouts using simple Excel tables.  Here is an example of a Layout table created in Excel and the corresponding Web page it produces:

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