You're pretty much right. It doesn't do much beyond just tying the form
to the object right now. I think things that would be nice to add are:
*more flexible and available validation
*dynamically created forms (like RoR scaffolding)
I'm not sure if that stuff solves the problems you provide, but it's a
start
One of the problems I run into here is that some people like to put
<b>all</b> of their logic in the page behinds, which to me seems like a
horrible practice. I guess I'm more of a purist, but I'm trying to keep
as much logic as possible out of there. I wrote up aspbeans to try to
alleviate some of it, because then people seemed to not take over the
save/load logic, and then they just let the model take care of itself.
Since I've played with RoR, I'm wondering if there's not some way I
could do something similar to that for ASP. I wouldn't even mind
implementing something more struts-like, because I think the idea of
having actions and clear-cut controllers instead of hacked-together
pages seems a lot cleaner.
I don't think that really answers your suggestion, though. I agree that
hiding web controls doesn't seem like a very sound solution. I'd rather
either a) make a separate page for each of those cases, using actions
(see above crazy implementation idea
, or b) have aspbeans have some
logic such that when it's creating a form, it can check that and not
create the control if it's there. I think either of these solutions is
going to require some growth in the framework, but that's what I'm
hoping for out of your suggestions
.
I'm not sure I understand your complaint about viewstate stuff, though.
If you want to go into it more, maybe I can address it
Thanks for your suggestions guys, that's what I was hoping for.
terry