first, a question: i'm trying to use forms via the widgets and continually running into issues
the latest of which- i have some form fields that are required - is there any way to get a red asterisk ala '<span class="required-input">*</span>' into the label, or is am I SOL ? then a critique: i really intensely dislike the forms support in turbogears. the widgetless approach ( http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/wiki/WidgetlessForm ) seems to be the most straightforward, but no different than CGI and has no validation the simple widget ( http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/wiki/SimpleWidgetForm ) is less straightforward , and doesn't seem to offer anything over dynamic html generation - which can be awkward to fit into a design layout then there's the formencode approach ( http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/wiki/FormValidationWithWidgetsTwo ) which is just a headache. i'm staring at a class FormTest controller, a def to create a form, and then a seperate class to validate the form. thats just too much - its confusing and awkward. i've spent the better part of the night trying to hack out something modeled similar to a TAL form generator i once made based on Perl's formbuilder ( www.formbuilder.org ) , but with no luck - perhaps someone here can offer me some pointers Here's the general idea that I have so far: every 'form' is instantiated as a class of fields /validators /descriptors and an output provider is specified someone can just make an inheritable form class, and if the widgets behind it change - not to worry - the parent class handles it all. no one even needs to use the widgets - it can output into non-widget dicts it still uses everything that TG uses right now, but behind the scenes (ie, the parent class handles widgets and FormEncode, etc ) it would look something like this: Class Form__formname(tg_form): fields = { 'name' : { 'type':'textfield' , 'validators' : 'NotEmpty' }} # where fields is a dict of dicts. keys are the fieldname, internal kv pairs are semantic descriptors chained_validators = {} output = 'widget' inherited class functions def validate(self): runs through the fields using tg validate on each field based on the descriptor def render(self): if output is 'widget' does a widgets.TableForm else handles errors, plain text maybe TG can handle something like that already? i don't know. right now though, forms are overly complex and quite a turnoff for me. i can see the seeds of some powerful form creation/validation in TG, but its kind of crazy that there's no Form class - just tons of stuff for form elements. i'm picky - i like all my forms in their own namespace and everything nice and compartmentalized. if TG can support this already, I'd love to know how. otherwise i'm going to have to port perl code to python -- and nobody here wants me to do that. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
