Well, my overall reaction is that my nice, simple ad_form idea has been fubar'd beyond belief.  I had no idea that people were turning into a general record display mechanism.

No wonder no one - including me - understands how it works any more!

For the record, Ola ... the WHOLE IDEA behind the form template builder is to combine add/edit scripts into one.  ad_form makes it very easy to do so as it understands the form builder's state information, simplifying things.  So I'm glad you've taken this approach though folding in display, too - YUK.  GROSS.  DISGUSTING.

I'm depressed that folks are writing separate add and edit/view scripts.  The benefit of being able to share a single form declaration for both add and edit functions should be obvious.  This sharing's 90% of the point of taking the form builder approach.  Apparently the adding of the display functionality has made combining add/edit scripts along with display functionality enough of a hassle that people are giving up on that, as has Joel in his example.

There are many fundamental differences between a template that displays data and a form handling page.  The FORM tag comes to mind among other things ...

I called it "ad_form" for a reason ...

Don,

Let me see if I understand what you're saying...

form builder should be used to add and edit data, but not viewing.

CR/CMS should be used to display data, but currently there's no Tcl API (or is there in bcms-ui?)

Did I get this right? If I did, what's the recommended way to display data that one would perhaps also want to edit, in 5.0?

-Roberto