[Html-widget] HTML::Widget::Element::Field

[Carl Franks]

On 06/11/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Now when I think about this I think that you are probably right that
> the designer does not normally need to change the type of the field.
> The attributes, possibility to intersperse the inputs with additional
> tags and to change the order of fields should be quite reasonable
> range of customisation.  I would not care too much about fieldsets and
> ul/ols in HTML::Widget - I would just left that for the templating,
> but I would generate the hidden fields by the start_form helper.
>
> Unfortuntely I don't have any experience with designers in a Catalyst
> project.  The interface_config.dat should not be too complicated - and
> it can be made a bit simpler by choosing a separate directory for it
> and having separate files for each Controller, and also by using some
> config language instead of Perl datastructures.  But if it is only
> used by InstantCRUD than I am afraid people would not accept it.
>
> And where is that guy that started me thinking about this with his Rails email?

I've been thinking some more about my idea of parsing a form out of a
html/xml file, and it's maybe not as stupid as it first sounds.
It also doesn't even require any template markup.

Point H-W to any html/xml file, or a variable already containing the markup.
Search for a form with the same name as the widget, or failing that
the first form in the file.

For any markup which isn't a form input/button field, save it, so it
can be output later unchanged.
For any form input/button field, create a new element using the
attributes/content from the markup.

You've then got a ready-made $widget which you can add constraints and
filters to.

You could even then add any app-wide hidden fields to the end of the
widget, and they'll be included within the FORM tags, without the
designer having to know about it.

If I can get it working as I envisage, it's certainly something I'd use.
Is it likely to solve the problem you're looking at?
I'll have a hack, and see if I can come up with some working code.

Carl