On 4/30/2014 3:14 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
There's a plugin [1] for Rails for generating a form based on a type. I
don't understand how anyone can manage without that. It can
automatically respond in a couple of formats as well. By default JSON,
XML and Erb template. The most basic example will look something like this:
Automatic forms generated from a type are nice for quick-n-dirty stuff,
but I find they tend to work against (or at least be much less useful
for) the tweaking and customization usually needed in public-facing
production sites.
So I started doing it in reverse:
Instead of defining the form in the server-side code and then awkwardly
trying to make it generate the HTML I want, I just define the form in
HTML. (Or rather, in an HTML template that's still more-or-less valid
HTML, with a few additional non-standard tags to help with metadata like
"how to validate this field").
Then I use Adam's dom.d (in non-strict mode) to read the HTML form
template (preserving the templating stuff), and automatically infer
everything I need to automate the form's behavior (and to strip out the
non-standard metadata I added).
I've been pretty happy with that so far. It combines the DRY simplicity
of "define a form in ONE place and it 'just works'" with the full power
and control of hand-written HTML.
What I really need to do is fully de-entange that stuff from my
cluttered mess of a homemade web framework
<https://github.com/Abscissa/SemiTwistWeb> and release as a separate
cleaned-up lib.
