Hi Ron-
Thanks so much for writing. I always appreciate seeing other
people's code. I have to admit that I'm a bit puzzled as to how my
questions and your answers mesh. I'm sure this is just my lack of
understanding. Let me see if I can repeat back your answer in a
different way so you can see where the disconnect lies.
To the question of how to deal with several sets of data context (CGI
query, stuff stored in a session, etc), you seemed to reply "REST". I
thought I had a pretty decent handle of REST interfaces, but I don't
see how they come into play for me in this case. In my case I'm not
necessarily operating on specific objects like you were (contacts in
an address book). I think of rest as coming into play when one wants
to interact with objects like contacts, usually in a more random
access way. That differs from my mental model for my app in that I
see mine as more of moving through a sequence of cumulative steps (/
pages). Even if I were to think of it as moving around in a state
machine, I still can't conceive of how I would shoehorn it into a REST
frame of mind (the S in REST nonwithstanding). But even if I could,
how does this model reduce the multiple sets of data problem?
[Aside #1: I did look at using C::A::P::Stash, ala Catalyst, but it
didn't seem like it would help much]
To the question of "how do I deal with the complex control flow/data
handling introduced by validation", part of the answer seems to be to
use Data::FormValidator vs. C::A::P::ValidateRM. You seem to avoid the
"run_mode_1 leads to run_mode_2 leads to run_mode_3, oh wait, I have
to go back to run_mode_2 because the input run_mode_3 got wasn't
valid" control flow.
But I'm not clear how much of that avoidance comes from your
application not needing to backtrack with all previous state intact if
something goes wrong. Can I check if I understand something vis a vis
your recovery from error? I see you constructing an error-full
template to return from report_add, but I don't understand how that
gets the user back to add_note in such a fashion that they could
correct their mistake and continue on from there. Are you basically
resetting your notion of state at that point, such that when the user
comes back into add_note from the error'd template he or she does so
with no previous state saved? In my example, where I'm moving from
cumulative step to step I'm not clear I could do the same.
-- dNb
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