Re: thoughts on form building w/ or w/o DB_DataObject_FormBuilder

Norbert Mocsnik wrote:

Bertrand Mansion wrote:

FormBuilder is aimed at rapid prototyping (thanks to DB_DO and QF) but also allow some nice customizations that are more than enough for most users. But if you need more complex stuffs, I think going directly with QF is more appropriate.

Thanks for the thoughts Bertrand! I was thinking about using QuickForm directly but if I do that I loose the features offered by FormBuilder: auto-filling from a db, populating <select>s from linked tables; auto processing of crosslinks and triplelinks (which means handling 3 or 4 tables at the same time) etc. On the other hand, using QuickForm directly gives really more flexibility (knowing that you can still access & manipulate the form when using FormBuilder).

Hi Norbert, Bertrand hit the point quite precisely: FormBuilder really is all about Rapid Prototyping. However, if you need more flexibility, you're always free to put a getForm() method in your DataObject, where you can construct a QuickForm object as you please and return it - the form generation process will then be completely omitted, but you can still use the auto-processing FormBuilder provides. I've sometimes found myself using QuickForm directly in the past and I even recommend using it instead of letting FormBuilder do the form generation for you to gain speed once the application is in a state where it won't change much anymore. To make my life easier, I've also written a small class that automates all the page processing logic for me - it will take a DataObject, a template object and a third parameter that determines the type of the template (static/dynamic) and do everything else on its own - a whole database-driven page can become a four-liner this way. Another approach to somehow use a future QuickForm version might be to use a markup similar to that of ASP.NET, which could look like this: <qf:form name="myForm" datasource="variableName"> <fieldset> <legend>Just to say that normal HTML can still be used here</legend> <qf:label for="element">My label</qf:label> <qf:input name="element" type="text" valueMember="sourceFieldName"> <qf:rule type="required" /> <qf:rule type="minlength" param="3" /> </qf:input> </fieldset> <qf:button type="submit" name="submit" </qf:form> Something like this could be achieved with either PHPTAL or XML_Transformer. Downside: You'd need to do all your templates entirely using one of these packages or you'd need to have extra templates for all forms. CU Markus