[z3-five] formlib yes or no

[Dennis Schulz]

Thank you very much once more, Kapil, that is already a big help to me ;-)

If anyone knows examples of a bigger (enterprise?) applications please post.
I looked at various ones like schooltool, infrae library etc, and they 
already help, sometimes of course they lack zope 2 / five integration.

Dennis


Kapil Thangavelu escribió:
> On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:34:30 -0500, Dennis Schulz <d.schulz81 at gmx.net>  
> wrote:
>
>   
>> Hello
>>
>> I am currently in a decision making process to build an application.
>> (actually already over it)
>> In the last weeks and even months I made experiences with formlib and I
>> am questioning if it makes sense to carry on with formlib or design
>> everything from the ground up manually in own page templates.
>> The most scary thing is that there is very few documentation and almost
>> no examples of bigger applications using it.
>> Is anybody else using formlib/ widgets/ objectwidgets?
>> This is my first bigger application in which I try to use it, but I am
>> getting into more and more issues and thinking of swiching to handmade
>> forms again.
>> Maybe when it gets too special and there has to be customized to much in
>> comparision to the autogenerated form it is not worth dealing with all
>> the problems you get.
>>
>>     
>
> i've been using formlib extensively the last few months, it definitely has  
> a few warts as regards z2, but just most of the issues can be solved with  
> a custom subclass or custom widget. what formlib gives in turn offers  
> enough benefits that i tend to think its a huge win over manually dealing  
> with form validation/actions and is fairly generic as a policy framework  
> for attaching validation/failure/success handlers to, but i agree, that  
> its at times convoluted. and there is a strong sense when using that  
> widget framework hasn't been used in 'anger' in z2, thats distinct from  
> formlib though.
>
>   
>> Here a list of problems I currently have that are at least closly
>> related to formlib:
>>
>> - there is no update of no-value on select fields (choice). normally you
>> should also be able to choose nothing when the field is required=False
>>     
>
> probably easiest to just register a custom select field widget, that has a  
> blank option whhere warranted.
>
>   
>> - Standard AddFormbase is only for input widgets. I made an alternative
>> version that also allows passing the value through displayWidgets like
>> in the editForm.
>> Here I had the strange problem, that one particular value was sometimes
>> not included when for_display=True, but maybe also my own fault.
>>
>>     
>
> dunno.
>
>   
>> - What is the best place to set fields with default values? Sometimes I
>> need to get these values with GET. overwrite setupWidgets and set the
>> get_rendered attribute of the fields?
>>
>>     
>
> formlib sometimes needs some help here, you can either initialize the  
> object context with field defaults prior to display, manually constructing  
> formfield iterating over schema.getFields( iface ) to pass to a fields  
> container with get_rendered set (get_rendered = lambda form, field=field,  
> field.default), or subclass form and reimplement setupWidgets, i had to  
> custom patch it to get this, afaicr...
>
>
>   
>> - various action buttons that allow a different application of the
>> entered values. How only validating a certain part of the form?
>>     
>
> you can set a different validator on a given action, which can implement  
> validation however you want.
>
>
>   
>> - cancel button without any validation? In my form every click on cancel
>> also performs a validation even if I don't explicitly call applychanges.
>> Why?
>>     
>
>
> hmm.. this is sort of lame.. i agree, the formbase.validate always gets  
> called..
>
> form.formbase.update->form.handleSubmit->(no custom validator on  
> action)->default validator->formbase.validate
>
> you can define a return true validator on your cancel action to avoid, or  
> override update.
>
>
>   
>> - more control over validation. how can I validate and save only two
>> fields of a form, not the whole list?
>>     
>
>
> custom validator on action, custom success handler on action.
>
>
> hth,
>
> kapil
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