04-01-2011 01:53 PM
Hi jimctr,
The most likely way that you would architect your application would be as a series of different web service calls. The first web service would send the manufacturer data to a web service, which would return with a list of the available CSV files. This list would be displayed in the second combo box. When a user selected a file, that would be sent to a second web service that returns the pertinent description data, etc.
In other words, there's no reason why you can't have a set of web services that are called serially as the user moves through the form. This would be true in both Web UI Builder and any other environment for developing web-based applications (like Adobe's tools for Flash). To answer your question, yes, if you didn't use Web UI Builder, you would have to use Adobe Flex, HTML/JavaScript, or another web programming language.
The LabVIEW application web server does support server-side scripting, but I'm not sure if form objects are part of that. NI OEMs our web server from a company called MBedthis; the web server is called AppWeb. Given it's popularity, you can find a lot of documentation for it online, so you can probably just do some searching to investigate whether form objects are supported.
Hope that helps!
-Mike