Re: Widget states: let's do it (was Re: CForms making widgets invisible)

[Sylvain Wallez]

Claudius Spellmann wrote:
Sylvain Wallez schrieb:

<snip/>
Mmmh... we could say that validation is not performed on 
disabled/invisible widgets and their children. But this may cause 
some forms to appear falsely valid, as non-enabled widgets may be 
required and/or have validators that use values of other widgets.

So I would better go the safer way, which is to validate *all* widgets.
As for wizards, we could have an additional method on the JS Form 
object that, instead of handling the whole form at once, may handle 
it's first-level children which may be widget groups for each page of 
the wizard.

Sylvain
Ok if a widget is set invisible it is not rendered by cocoon but that 
doesn't mean that the widget is not existing in the widget container 
so if a widget is required and not visible but still exists in the 
container does mean it could be validated  ????

Yes.
What about following widget states: enabled (default) < disabled < 
hidden < invisible
The difference between hidden and invisible would be that hidden is 
still rendered but with an hidden attribute in the declaration and 
would go through the validation process. Invisible on the other side 
could be taken of the form completly and while a widget is in an 
invisible state all validation would be switched off. This way every 
user could decide wether they want to use validation or not and the 
output still  would look the same.

Interesting thoughts. But as we saw previously, "hidden" has an implied 
meaning because of its use for <input type="hidden"> in HTML and I'd 
like to avoid it.

What you're describing here is a widget state that is even less visible 
than invisible, since no validation occurs. What about a "phantom" 
state, where the widget exists but isn't validated?

BTW, overnight I finally felt that "enabled" being the negation of 
"disabled" can lead to confusion as when we have to talk about a widget 
that's not in "enable" state, the natural word that comes is "disabled" 
which is only one of the particular possible states for a non-enabled 
widget. So in the end, I think "active" is better than "enabled".

That would lead to:
 active (default) < disabled < invisible < phantom
Thoughts?
Sylvain
--
Sylvain Wallez                                  Anyware Technologies
http://www.apache.org/~sylvain           http://www.anyware-tech.com
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