My initial comment on this is that I think this idea is going 100% in the
right direction.
The problem here, as I understand it, is to begin to break down the still
too-strict coupling (in Turbine) between display and business logic. That
is, the current framework of Turbine encourages code to be organized around
Actions and Screens - which are tied directly to templated HTML screens -
instead of around the 'logical' business objects of an application. Another
way of putting this: you want your app design to be organized around your
business objects (at least logically), not spread out through screens and
actions.
Let me expand/modify the xml definition you suggest and try a few other
ideas on you. Hopefully I can do this without an avalanche of details.
<dialog id="issue_attrib_defn">
<object type="ScarabIssueAttributeValue" id="att"/>
<panel>
<InputField name="option_id" id="o" type="int" obj_map="att"
map_to="OptionId">
<Rule mask="[0..9] onError="-1" />
</InputField>
<InputField name="value" id="v" type="String" obj_map="att"
map_to="Value">
<Rule max_length="255" />
</InputField>
</panel>
</dialog>
My suggestion here is that the xml defines not only the info available to a
template designer but also how fields from a form should be transformed and
mapped back to objects in the applications data model. In other words the
xml - the metadata - defines what dynamic information is available to the
template designer and how it maps into the app's business logic.
It becomes possible then to write or generate Actions and Screens (the
Turbine objects) that can interpret the xml and generate the dynamic data to
be put into the context for the template designer and take form data,
process it and map it correctly into the data objects in the system.
Having an app described this way would have endless benfits, not the least
of which is that it becomes much easier to modify. If you want to break the
functionality of one screen into two the app designer modifies the xml and
the template designer re-writes the affected screen.
Comments please. :)
PaulO.
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