[binarycloud-dev] UI Controls

[Alex B. <en...@tu...>]

hi all,

coming up soon I'm going to release the UIControlManager class, which uses a
set of subclasses like:

    TextBoxControl
    WindowStatusControl
    PasswordControl
    TextareaControl
    MultiTextBoxControl
    PulldownControl
    SelectBoxControl
    RadioButtonControl
    CheckBoxControl
    HrefControl
    DateControl
    CurrencyControl
    ButtonControl

to render entity fields into forms and layouts.

These classes will allow FormBuilder to construct forms from an entity
definition only - unless you need something special (like a subset of
fields, or a specific layout, or to override a UIControl assignment) -
you'll be able to "say": "Give me a form for the furbees entity" and you're
done.

I expect to adopt a similar design for ListBuilder, i.e. it will be passed
an entity definition, and will construct a table using 'list controls' such
as:

    TextHeaderControl
    OrderedTextHeaderControl
    ImageHeaderControl
    RowControl
    PaginationControl
    SimpleListControl
    
The idea here (much like Validators and Processors) is that you'll have a
set of 'default' classes to work with that come with the system, and the
ability to construct any additional classes you need for special cases. Each
of these classes will include markup from the user/tmpl/ hierarchy, so
you'll be able to copy/modify the markup as you see fit.

I hope everyone is starting to get the 'big picture' implications of
Entities and their effect on application development within binarycloud:
with these kinds of tools, you can expect to construct quality applications
_much_ more quickly.

best,

_alex