On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 10:58, George wrote:
> 2) How can one set style properties of widgets? I mean, let say, background,
font,
> border-styles, etc; where applicable.

I would like to vote for some changes in Form2 along these lines as
well.

One that I think should be in the standard class, since its simply valid
HTML, is 
.

I'm subclassing Form, WidgetRow etc (optionally) add some things like
HTML 4.01 tags fieldset and legend, which provides for a very nice
labelled border without resorting to any CSS styling.


        
Edit This Object


Minor change to Form:
class Form...
    def __init__(self, name=None, method="post", action_url=None,
                 enctype=None, use_tokens=True, legend=None):
        # optionally creates a nice HTML 4.01 driven labelled border
        self.legend = legend


It would also be useful to be able to pass CSS styling info to Widgets
as well as WidgetRow. I seem to recall some CSS discussion lately and
will go back and re-read that in the archives.

> 1) Could the widgets be designed so as to explicitly set their data sources
obtained
> from DBs? Now it seems to me sort of hard-coded.

This seems to me something best left done for an individual developer to
deal with by subclassing widgets. Otherwise, what DB access mechanism
would you support?

Python DBAPI is pretty low level, compared to what many Python - SQL
developers work with - prefering some sort of Object Relational mapping
such as Cucumber or ORM or others. And sometimes no RDBMS is involved at
all - i.e. the use of an object "database" such as ZODB.

You'll find that Quixote form objects work really well with either ZODB
or the object-relational mappers. Imagine something like this:

class DocType:
    bunch o attributes and methods


def edit_form():
    DOC_TYPES = db.make_catalog(DocType).fetchall()
    form.add(OptionSelectWidget, 'doc_type', title='Document
Type',options=DOC_TYPES)
    ...
    ...

    if not form.is_submitted():
        return render()

    # do something with what was submitted
    # NOTE that doc_type will contain an object instance, not just a
    # string from the forms select widget -- in this
    # made up example, a true blue object persisted in the database

    doc_type = form['doc_type']
    ...

Its pretty simple, and very powerful and useful. And also pretty
different to most things I was used to on the Microsoft side... a little
mind set change required.


--
Mike Watkins
mw@mikewatkins.net


"Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same
thing as division."