Need a new Forms Sample (and other improvements to forms)

[Berin Loritsch <bl...@d-haven.org>]

Based on my experiences with CForms, I have to say that I am very 
frustrated.  Yet at this point we are committed.  I think something that 
would greatly reduce my frustrations as well as other potential users is 
a full soup to nuts explanation of how to set up forms for your existing 
application from scratch.  Next, and possibly just as important, how to 
use CForms to do tag management like del.ico.us and Flickr.  There 
should be three tracks depending on what you bind your form to.  I'm not 
the guy to do it because I am completely lost and I can't seem to make 
heads or tails of where I am in the process or what is going wrong.

Now, as to improvements to forms, there are some things that are 
absolutely necessary in order to make use of CForms.  First, is a 
special type of sitemap.  An extension, if you will, that automatically 
adds the matchers necessary to resolve the javascript resources instead 
of relying on people to set that up themselves.  It would also include 
the declarations for the CForm specific 
generators/selectors/serializers/transformers/etc.

Additionally, there are two ways to set up forms depending on whether 
AJAX is enabled or not.  Typically you have a generator followed by a 
transformer.  Why not make one forms generator that handles that for you 
(i.e. auto-chains the necessary transformations right after the source 
is generated ala JX script)?  Also there is a transformation followed by 
a choice of serializer.  Again, why not have a forms serializer that 
takes care of the final transformation and choice of serializer for you?

It took me a week of trial and error to figure out why things were only 
partially working on an upload form.  I finally have it working, but the 
AJAX enabled portion is not doing its job right.  There is more trial 
and error and I don't have another week to futz with it.

At this point, I'm going to have to give up on doing things the CForms 
way and hack together something that is far less elegant but I know will 
work.  At least I will be able to report progress.  I'm sharing these 
observations in the hopes that we can avoid having more folks as 
frustrated as me.

-- 
*Berin Loritsch*
Owner 	

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