[Html-widget] XML, forms and wizards

[Michael Gray]

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