I'm just curious on this one. An application I inherited at the new job is a big ( read: almost umwieldy ) piece of code with a web interface for creating "large database-driven forms" because, according to the owner of the (small) company, "programmers hate developing forms."

Maybe I've been spoiled a bit my taking advantage of Template::Toolkit's integration with CGI.pm, but I've never had an issue creating forms. A few database queries to get the defualt (already in the DB) values for a given form, to get the popup_menu() options, and pass it all into TT. Let CGI.pm handle the HTML for the form elements, like: 

[%  mycgi.popup_menu( 
    '-name'=>'areaIDs', 
    '-values' => AREAS.keys.nsort, 
    '-labels' => AREAS,
    '-default' => THIS_PAGE.area_id,
    '-multiple' => '1', 
    '-size' => '5' ) %]

[download]
And I'm done with a form element. If I need a handful of them, I still only have one line of code in the form to generate another element ( and maybe another query to get the info for that particular form element ).

So, am I just going about things "the long way?" Is there some real benefit to a custom-rolled, DB-driven form generator that's only used for DB-based forms?

In reply to "roll your own" form generator by geektron

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