Is this feasible/sensible in Node Red

General
1

Hey Guys, Helping out someone who needs to get a computer neophyte to answer a series of questions that will feed into (ultimately) a budget for an organisation.

The person can not be trusted in Excel to do direct edits etc.

Basically needs to be lead through a series of 200 (approx) questions as to P&L items and how they will vary for the upcoming year (it will be a single person only using this and it will be contained within a virtual machine environment on a dedicated laptop, security will be handled by firewalls etc within the virtual machine)

Each question will be something along the lines of

Q1)
Income account - Sales of widgets - Current YTD = $x, proposed value for next year -

They will be given options in a drop down for the proposed value for next year of %increase, Absolute Value

And will then be able to choose one of the options which would then lead to another input field etc.

Once the questions have all been answered the application would produce a CSV file ready for import back into the budgetting application.

Would you tackle something like this in NR (probably with UIB as the front end) or better done in Excel with a Series of Macros ??

Craig

2

For a P&L report?

Sounds a bit over engineered?
Yes, Node RED is fully capable, but is all this really needed?

My approach will be some carefully designed XL, with winform inputs - or even an access application, that produces the excel output from user input

Sounds a lot less involved than having to mess with firewalls/VMs for a report? :sweat_smile:

3

Hi Craig,

By far the easiest approach would be a spreadsheet. Don't forget that you can easily lock down a spreadsheet so that only certain cells can be changed. The structure of the workbook can be completely locked other than specific cells. I've used this professionally many times in the past to collect data from IT numpties. :smiley:

You could, of course, also do this in uibuilder. You would probably want to find a form builder library to assist but even doing it manually wouldn't be that hard and you could even use the "form" setting of the uib-element node to build a form for you from JSON data. But, as Marcus has said, it is a fair bit of trouble to set up Node-RED just for this purpose.