Re: CSS forms

Posted by David E. Jones on Jun 23, 2006; 6:02pm
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/CSS-forms-tp168701p168706.html


I may be out of my mind here... but this sounds like a great case for using an FTL file instead of a form widget. It sounds like it is minimally data driven and mostly oriented to a custom UI. A horizontal bar of fields is not something that has come up enough for me to be comfortable with an abstraction for it going into the form widget. Even if we were to put something like that in the form widget I'd really like to see a number of manually done cases for the functionality to cover before even _thinking_ about an addition.

There is some messy stuff in there that probably would have been cleaner if this approach was used more, and at this point where stability in the framework is becoming more important, having good background study before adding to the form widget or any other tool is important. If it seems to be a matter of convenience to implement it in the form widget so you don't have to manually create the HTML then that may be a good sign of a cart before the horse and stepping back for a wider view might be a good idea.

Some of the things you mentioned, like lookup windows and the date/time popup, partially predate the form widget and are very easy to use without it (ie to just pop into an FTL file).

-David


Al Byers wrote:

> I know there has been discussion about this in the  past, but I can't
> see a clear answer to my questions from them. I see a need for a simple
> ability to create single forms with css styles only. My current need is
> to show a horizontal query bar with drop-downs that send a query to the
> server. In this case I do not want any titles to show. I looked at using
> the position attribute to do this, but the table format screws things
> up. I also want to be able to take advantage of other widget special
> features, such as lookup or dates, without having tables involved.
>
> I was just thinking of creating a new form type, "css", that cycles thru
> the fields and does not do anything with tables and ignores the title if
> it is empty.
>
> Is this too simplistic? A bad idea? Won't be difficult to put together.
>
> -Al