Add Forms support

[sam]

Something like [bureaucrat]. I'm imagining a /forms directory off the application root. So Forms are a first-class-citizen just like /controllers, /models, etc.

This would be a good place to stick much of the standard logic that makes up an action so actions could be boiled down to something like:

update do |id|
  @form = UserForm.new(User.get(id))
  if @form.save
    redirect "users/index"
  else
    render "users/edit"
  end
end

We could riff on that as a starting point perhaps. Hopefully that gives the general idea though. Forms would handle Validation and Security. Not models.

[sam]

formation is another variation on this. Two comments: I don't like the Form#submit. It looks like you're performing an action. Also, it's not obvious that it supports nested or complex objects.

[fgrehm]

If we end up writing something from scratch, we might consider something like virtus for defining form attributes and handling values coercion.

[sam]

Yeah, it looks like it could get us quite a ways there.

I do so hate external dependencies though. ;-) I had hoped that we could just vendor whatever we settled on if it were a smaller project.

We should try to catch up on IRC sometime. Maybe schedule it. And we three (@Bauerpauer) can see if we can come to a consensus.

[jchilders]

So based on the discussions from this morning what we're looking at is a new class, Harbor::Form, which (a) performs contextual validation, (b) renders HTML snippets for the form, (c) lives off the root under a forms/ directory.

Also, in order to reduce dependencies the implementation will not use Formation or any other existing library.

[Bauerpauer]

James, we can skip the "contextual validation" portion, since that's what we're gaining by validating each form individually. The rest is what we need, though.

• A Harbor::Form class that inherits from Bureaucrat, or our own custom implementation, that functions much like Sam's example from the top.
• The Harbor::Form should be renderable using Harbor's view-path system.
• Some sort of form-helpers for use inside of Form Views would be nice as well (maybe there could be some kind of Harbor::FormViewContext that are auto-blessed w/ these helpers)