Fnargh::Form::Auto (Soon to be HTML::FormHandler::Reflector::DBIC)

I've never really liked dealing with creating forms. You have to write a butt load of tedious HTML, validate it, and then return error messages as needed. If you want it to be fancy and pretty, you have to write a bunch of CSS to put your error messages where you want and make them shiny. Luckily, there are things to handle this.

Being a Moose fanatic, I am most partial to the latter, HTML::FormHandler. It's extremely easy to use, and requires zero configuration file crap. You get validation as Moose types/constraints, it's very cool.

So, back to me hating having to build forms. This includes building a form for something that already has enough information to build a form from, say, a database schema. My dream has been to be able to read a database schema (preferably DBIx::Class), and generate a form based on the data types specified in said schema. This is completely doable! Heck, even I drafted up some code to get some preliminary form fields from a database. The following is from the CMS I'm working on, using HTML::FormHandler and DBIx::Class to get things done. This is extremely proof of concept code, and doesn't actually have any logic to determine what kind of form element a given schema entity should be. That, however, should be fairly trivial and I will undoubtedly be writing a follow up to that effect. Go here to check out the source: http://gist.github.com/230652. Enjoy.