Re: [xwiki-devs] [proposal] Develop form, field, and validation constraint classes and abandon the practice of storing form information in the class.

Hi, I would like to propose a change in direction. I think the practice of marrying form fields to class properties should be discontinued. Including form information in the class property makes certain jobs easier but XObjects do not always represent forms and marrying something as high level as forms with something as low level as objects makes code maintenance exceedingly difficult, not to mention the general ugliness of code in xwiki-core which generates HTML.

I would like to start development of 3 new XWikiDocuments: XWiki.FormClass, XWiki.FormFieldClass and XWiki.FormFieldConstraintClass. Much of the code in XWiki.Registration will be ported to these classes. The fields will be validated twice, once at the client side with LiveValidation, and once at the server side. I would then like to deprecate the use of the display related settings in the class editor and eventually remove them from the class editor entirely. I envision a form being made and fields added similar to the way we add objects to a document. Likewise, each field will be defined by selecting a display type from a predefined list then adding validation constraint objects to the field. I have not started development on this and I am sure there will be plenty more to discuss later. What I want to know is whether people think this is the right direction. WDYT?

Caleb _______________________________________________ devs mailing list devs(a)xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs