I've been trying to solve a specific problem from the bottom up, but perhaps someone else has a better idea on how to structure the whole thing, so it might be more useful to describe what I'm trying to accomplish.
I have a dynamic table with a single text field. One entry per line, and users can add as many lines as they need. The data that's entered into that table at the beginning of the form needs to be used in multiple dynamic tables throughout the rest of the form.
Ex (yes, not real code, just illustrating the format):
Table 1 - Widget
<textfield>widget</textfield>
addRow deleteRow
Table 5 - Size
<dropdown>widget</dropdown> <textfield>size</textfield>
addRow deleteRow
Table 8 - Cost
<dropdown>widget</dropdown> <textfield>productionCost</textfield>
addRow deleteRow
So far I've been able to pull the values out of table 1 and pull them into a dropdown list in table 5, but any attempt to turn the dropdown into a global data object breaks everything, and the coding is complicated enough that it's not terribly feasible to create 30 functions in the document to individually pull the same data into each table's dropdown list. I was thinking maybe an embedded XML schema could be populated on the fly from table 1, then the dropdowns could be bound to that internal list for the list items, but I have no idea how to create that sort of setup. Everything has to be self-contained within the form, so I can't send it to an external database and then call it back in.
My other option is to just dump the most common choices into the dropdown and let the user enter anything unusual, but I know from experience that results in some widgets not being entered in later tables because the user forgets exactly what they added to this specific form.