Re: [Perl-widget-developer] XSP PerForm taglib (fwd)

[Matt S. <ma...@se...>]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Gunther Birznieks wrote:

> My initial reaction is that I think this is much more complex than a widget 
> library that produces HTML and it's even less clear to me that XML is a 
> good delivery mechanism for abstracting forms.

What XML gains you is parsability, so you can generate code easier when
you just stick widgets on the form.

> I truly believe that when you make an app into an HTML app vs a WML app vs 
> anything else that the screens are significantly different.

Well that's fair enough, and you can do that too with this system. I
believe you totally that WML and HTML forms are significantly different.

The idea here though is to allow developers to use the same widget
language for different forms.

> I think that this XML stuff may be fine for content sites like newspapers, 
> but for an app it seems like it's a lot of work for much less gain than you 
> get on the pure content management side.

I've changed the implementation a bit since I posted that, though you
appear pretty set in stone about your ideas of a good widget system...

So given a form as follows:

<f:form name="mailinglist>

<f:textfield name="email"/>
<f:single-select name="type"/>
<f:submit name="subscribe" value="Submit"/>
<f:submit name="cancel" value="Cancel"/>

</f:form>

You can optionally (all functions are optional) supply the following subs:

start_form_mailinglist
end_form_mailinglist
load_email
validate_email
load_type
validate_type
submit_subscribe
submit_cancel

I think (hope) the sub names are pretty self explanatory now. Each sub
recieves a $ctxt object so you can maintain state. I'm thinking of
including the form name in the widget callback subs somehow, so you can
have widgets of the same name on the same page but in different forms. The
return value of submit_* is a string that the library sends a redirect to.

Anyway, this isn't the same goal as your Widget.pm library. You could
never use that in AxKit/XSP because its designed very differently from any
technology you are used to. So this is a simple way to do forms for people
using AxKit, and I think it's a lot easier than the current methods
(current methods available in AxKit/XSP, that is).

Enjoy :-)

-- 
<Matt/>

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