Ovid has the right solution, given what you've laid out. There may be other considerations, but you didn't tell us what they were. :-)

To continue further, doing what Ovid has described requires that you be willing to do this kind of analysis of your requirements. However, if it's an application of any reasonable complexity and/or lifespan, the cost of the time spent doing this will be realized over 100-fold during the first 6 months of development. (And, no, that's not an exagerration. If anything, it's a very conservative estimate.) The very fact you say raving mess of a question means that you feel you don't have a very good understanding of your requirements, let alone how you want to go about designing it. To me, that's a very large blinking red flag that my development effort is going to be marred by cost overruns, late deliveries, and a large ulcer. Personally, I think those are all things to avoid. But, Slavercise has been in the news lately, so go figure!

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

In reply to Re: OO/Application Framework question by dragonchild
in thread OO/Application Framework question by joeblow

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.