On 11/03/2006, at 16:04, Robin Haswell wrote:
>
> Hey guys
>
> I've just started a Turbogears project (.9a1) to see if it really
> could
> help me speed up my web application development (short answer: it
> didn't). However, I thought it might be useful for me to let you know
> my thoughts on the form widgets work coming from a PHP developer's
> POV.
>
> My code was basically this:
>
> class RegisterForm(widgets.WidgetsDeclaration):
> userId = widgets.TextField("Username")
> password = widgets.PasswordField("Password")
> emailAddress = widgets.TextField("E-mail address")
> displayName = widgets.TextField("What do you like to be called?")
> firstname = widgets.TextField("First name")
> lastname = widgets.TextField("Last name")
>
> and then:
>
> @turbogears.expose(html=".templates.register")
> def register(self):
> register_form = widgets.TableForm(fields=RegisterForm(),
> submit_text="Register")
> return dict(form=register_form)
>
> I'm probably doing it wrong (which is not the point), but intuitively
> you would expect to get form fields with the name attribute as the
> RegisterForm members, with the label values as the TextField
> parameter.
> What I got was the label values at the TextField parameter, which
> was..
> wrong. Maybe there's a keyword argument I should have been setting,
> but
> I think the way I thought it should be is the most intuitive way of
> doing it (by definition, I guess).
Yep, you just missed the "label" keyword parameter, that would be:
userId = widgets.TextField(label="Username")
Regarding RegisterForm, a WidgetsDeclaration is really a normal list
but one you can define as a class but with the fields as attributes.
example:
>>> class MyFields(WidgetsDeclaration):
... name = TextField(label="bbb")
... age = TextField(label="aaa")
...
>>> MyFields()
[TextField(name='name', field_class='textfield', attrs={}), TextField
(name='age', field_class='textfield', attrs={})]
With the only difference that the first syntax is much nicer :)
This is really only a list of fields, they "become" a form as soon as
you create instantiate it with your fields:
TableForm(fields=MyFields())
>
> Anyway, now I'm doing it the manual way, which sucks because I have to
> type "username" five times to get the result I want. As a profession
> PHP programmer, I know from experience that at least 50% of my time
> goes in to form generation, collection and validation. If Turbogears
> really wants to be a RAD tool, this really needs to be sorted out :-/
This is exactly what the Forms do ;) You can also attach a validator
to each of your fields so when the form is submitted your controller
gets clean values. Short example:
class MyFields(WidgetsDeclaration):
name = TextField(label="bbb")
age = TextField(label="aaa", validator=validators.Int())
form = TableForm(fields=MyFields())
@expose(template="X")
def new_user(self):
return dict(form=form, action="save_user")
@validate(form=form)
@error_handler(new_user)
@expose(template="Y")
def save_user(self, name, age):
assert isinstance(age, int)
# do something useful...
Template X contains something like:
${form.display(action=action)}
These few lines of code will:
1) display the form to the user when he/she points his/her browser
to /new_user
2) validate it making sure age is a number and converting it for
your app to use
3) Redirect the user back to /new_user if validation fails and show
nice error messages beside the fields explaining what went wrong and
prepopulating it with the vallues he/she had previously filled in.
This is just a silly example but you can get the feel of it... It's
true that there's a big lack of documentation (formal documentation
that is) regarding all this but I hope it will soon be sorted out.
>
> Apologies if this is fixed in SVN, I'm not running SVN because I need
> to keep my environment stable - I'm hoping this project's completion
> will coincide with the 0.9 release. About 3 months, right?
SVN has a nice internal cleanup regarding forms/widgets waiting for
0.9a2 :) However, the example I showed you should work fine in .9a1
>
Hope it helps,
Alberto
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