By Starvin15 on

After a few days of searching, I haven’t found a forum topic, website, or tutorial to fully address my question below.

Background on Planned Site – Kicking off the build of a heavily computational website that will be based on financial analysis of user submitted information. As an example (simplified version), user fills out a form on current income, income growth, current expenses, and expense growth. This would be stored data and I’ll build a custom module to pull it from SQL, calculate income / expense over time, and make it accessible to either (i) Views Charts / Charts and Graphs for display or (ii) a Views table to show income, expense, and net income over time.

Issue – I am much more comfortable writing custom modules in PHP and accessing information from SQL than creating dynamic forms, using Ajax, etc. My research pointed me toward either the Entityform or Webform module. I like the field flexibility of Entityform, but I am wary of the stated max of 150 fields. None of my individual forms would be that big, but there will likely be a number different ones (a noted strength of Webform). I almost always defer to contributed modules for all the typical reasons (e.g., at least for me it significantly accelerates development time, security, maintenance), assuming it’s feasible.

Question – Any thoughts on performance from using Entityform or Webform (especially given the custom module(s) will pull from SQL and slow things down)? Any thoughts on which of these would work best, or if I should build custom forms instead? Any thoughts on how you might approach or what I might be missing?

I would really appreciate any feedback. It would be great to start down the right path instead of doubling back.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

I believe the max fields for entity forms is per form (not global).

I would go with entity forms, it has better views integration. Using a custom form will require more work and unless you use fields, will not have views support unless you provide it.

Starvin15’s picture

Starvin15 commented

Really appreciate the help. Any thoughts on the performance implications? My guess would it would actually be better with the EntityForm module.

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

For any form regardless of how it is produced, there is a point where it is simply too many form fields. Also, the type of fields and any ajax processing may negatively impact performance as the number of fields grow.