Welcome to the Virtual Help Desk

This is an automated and dynamic form generation system, serving the Math and Computer Science Devision, Systems Group, at Argonne National Lab. We have taken several common Help Desk calls and turned them into simple forms. By using forms, you save your valuable time. By using forms, we get the information we need quickly and accurately. We hope this system improves the Systems Group's general work flow.

More practically, we work to empower you, the end user, to make and use the tools you need. The Virtual Helpdesk allows you to easily Create a web-based Form. No programming knowledge needed! Then, later, you can come back and retrieve the information others put into the form. Our objective is to empower our users, letting those people who want a form to create one, access it, and then get the information out of it.

We hope you enjoy the Virtual Helpdesk, and have an error-free experience. If there are any problems, please contact the manned Help Desk directly at (630) 252-6813, or send an email to vhd-dev@…, and we'll do our best to make it better!

About the Project: FormStage

This project is about your work, your data, and what you want to happen. We host web forms; you make web forms, easily. We take care of the technology, and the rest is up to you. We have created a new system, called FormStage, with which we are able to present forms and the data they contain to our users, simply and easily. In this version, we are using XForms and XML data, as well as Pylons and the Mako templating system.

XML is our primary driving concept for this new version of the Virtual Helpdesk. With XML, we can better and more precisely model the data as it comes in and moves through the system. The form data is no longer constrained by the container (tables, lists, etc.) within which it is stored. The serving of the forms is separated logically and physically from the holding of the data.

Pylons and Mako allow us to make a faster and more versatile web framework. We have taken a base Mako template, for the common look-and-feel necessary for a large institution, and constructed various forms and data representations within it. The Model-View-Controller allows us to control what is displayed and when, without the unnecessary and disorganized overhead.

Requirements

These are the current requirements:

"Python >= 2.4 <= 2.5; 2.6 is untested", "SQLite3", "Pylons>=0.9.7", "sqlalchemy>=0.5", "authkit>=0.4.3", "lxml==1.3.6", "formbuild>=2.0", "pycha == 0.5", "pyDes==2.0.0", "pycairo == 1.4.12", "scipy>=0.6.0",

Thanks

This project was developed under the supervision of Rick Bradshaw and Craig Stacey, and with much help from Ken Raffenetti, Narayan Desai, Beth Cerny, and the entire Argonne MCS Systems Group. Their warm and gracious support have helped make this project a reality.

About us

Scott Thompson and Nathan Mitchell are two students at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. We came to Argonne in the summer of 2008 on a SULI grant, and stayed as co-op students through today... albeit long distance at times!