Re: Form builder?

webb(dot)sprague(at)gmail(dot)com wrote:

>So far, here are the candidates: Andromeda, Lazarus, and Rekall.
>
>I was probably fairly inarticulate in my first post, but none of these
>seem to meet my criteria for automatic generation of forms based on the
>database definition. Most of the above frameworks have a good deal
>more functionality than I need, at least at first. Really I want to be
>able to open, say, ipython and type:
>
>Someobject.form(table='sometablename', times=3)
>
>(Maybe at the SQL prompt: "> \form name=name times=3")
>
>And have it give cycle three times through a reasonable (though
>possibly still imperfect) form for entering three rows in table
>sometablename. I don't want to do any developing except for finding
>out the table names in the database.
>
This is no small task.

I can say with plenty of confidence that we have tried almost every
approach to automating the generation of code.

The problem you run into is that there is no end to the kind of "macros"
that can be made. What we settled upon was to create the most necessary
and basic stuff, and then to embellish it later as needed. The two
fundamentals turn out to be a browse of search results and a display of
detail.

For one customer we then experimented with a three-row editable grid of
data from a child table, but found when working with it that users shied
away from it, and back we were to the primitives that have been working
so well since day 1.

All of that being said, if you want to do it yourself, I would still
claim that you'd get there a lot faster adopting Andromeda, because all
you are really trying to do is embellish what we've already done.