[Catalyst] XML, forms and wizards
Michael Gray
mjg17 at eng.cam.ac.uk
Tue Jun 27 12:24:09 CEST 2006
Excuse the cross-posting, but this is reasonably relevant to Catalyst
and HTML::Widget.
Before I reinvent too many wheels, I'd like to find out if anyone else
is playing with, or has a good solution for, some of the following.
I have at least one application which requires multi-stage wizard-like
forms. The details of the forms, and control over which fields are
read-only, which are optional, etc., need to be adjustable by staff who
are not HTML or perl experts. There are multiple variants of the forms,
depending on the category of the end user.
My outline plan is:
1) Use a reasonably simple XML document to specify each form and its
behaviour. Our non-expert staff will be capable of understanding and
editing this. Format probably based on simplified XForms with the
head/model and body sections merged. (Full XForms is (a) overkill
and (b) not suitable for modification by non-expert staff [*].)
2) Parse or XSLT-transform this document to build:
HTML::Widget instances (including constraints)
Help files
HTML templates (TT or Mason) if required
DBIx::Class::HTMLWidget interactions with the database.
Has anyone been here before? Any alternatives which would be less work?
Does anyone have nice examples of handling wizard-like forms in
Catalyst?
Whilst I can't overengineer this too much for the app in question, if
this sounds useful I can try to come up with a module along these lines.
Thanks in advance for any help or comment!
[*] Having said that, a perl implementation of Chiba would be a nice
project: http://chiba.sourceforge.net/
--
Michael
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