Hi Jonny,
Hey, could you do a favor...? When you want to start a new thread on
this list, compose your post as a "new" message instead of using Reply.
Even though you change the Subject: line, the In-Reply-To: header
still screws up the threading in our mailreaders. That's a pain, but
it's also bad for you, because if I did not happen to be interested in
the thread "AW: CForms and Modular Database Actions", I might never
have opened up that thread (which you replied on) and seen your post
about "When do they make sense? Design question". Then you would have
been deprived of my priceless commentary :-) :-) (see below...)
On Jun 15, 2005, at 7:09 AM, Johannes Becker wrote:
Hi,
a general question.
I've got a page with two textboxes. These two have to be filled in
(with whatever you want). Does it make sense to use CForms or just
check them in Flow?
Other pages of my app use the CForms, because they're "more difficult".
Now I wonder if its bad programming style to switch between two ways
of form-validation.
Well, I would consider it to be bad style! :-)
I use CForms for all forms, no matter how simple they are. But I have
some more framework of my own that I think makes this easier and
reduces the amount of cut-n-pastage needed to get up and going, so
YMMV. But notwithstanding that... I would say you should definitely
use Flowscript and the continuation model, whether or not you use
CForms proper. Otherwise, you'll be back in crappy "classic" webapp
mode where you have to think about the resource that is going to be
invoked by the form. I never have to think about that, it's always the
same — it's the continuation handler, which gets matched by a little
pipeline that's in the sitemap of _all_ my apps as part of the
"boilerplate" that goes in there whenever I start a new project. Plus,
I just really like having the code that displays the form in the same
place as the code that handles the values. I like the explicit control
flow.
Also... is this your login form that you were asking about the other
day? If so, then aren't those fields required? If they are, then you
need form validation, and that right there makes it "complicated
enough" that CForms is a win.
A final consideration... consistency is a good thing, because it
reduces the number of Brain Cycles it takes to deal with anything. So
if I have to deal with some code, and something is done one way in one
place and another way in another place, then I would like to be able to
assume that the programmer did it that way for some Good Reason besides
just being a lazy bastard, i.e. that they would not compromise the
value of "consistency" unnecessarily, and so if when I see something
that is different from something that it seems like it should be the
same as :-), then I will probably spend Brain Cycles trying to
understand why, i.e. searching for the Good Reason, and will be annoyed
if the Good Reason turns out not to exist.
The more you use CForms the more second-nature it will become, until
you won't even think "is this form really 'worth' using CForms for",
because CForms will be easy for you. You can hasten that day by
starting to use CForms for everything now! :-)
HTH,
—ml—
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