We have a site that still runs on ACS Classic 4.2 that we need to do some development on.  Unfortunately, the time frame of the development prevents us from moving over to openACS.

With the new development, however, I have backported a few of the new openACS enhancements, for our use in the classic environment, getting ad_form back was one of my priorities.

This morning, I began work on the ad_form backport.  In trying to meet the dependencies, I decided that since most of them were local to acs-templating, upgrading classic to use the latest acs-templating from openACS might be the best approach.

After making the appropriate backups, I loaded acs-templating and began testing.  I bought back the ::parameters procs and one or two others and the site came up without any problems.

Through testing, we discovered that the upgrade had broken all of the form-builder pages. Upon submission, the form doesn't update or insert new information into the database, it just reloads. After further investigation, it seems that the form-builder is unable to return the correct states (is_request, is_valid, is_submission).  I checked the source of the html files, and all of the magic form-builder variables are there (both for regular builder and ad_form), but the form-builder doesn't seem to be able to read those variables.

I've searched all afternoon trying to locate the source of this problem.  Does anyone have any ideas?

I started this whole effort by just trying to port ad_form. I was getting all of the needed bits out of oacs templating into classic templating, when I got to the ::button dependency (for -cancel_url) when I decided it might be easier to just bring the whole templating package back, which would also give us the richtext widget.

Anyway, I'll just revert to my earlier goal of getting ad_form back.  Perhaps acs-templating is too much to bite off.

Roberto's backport is my backport-- he is one of my coworkers. I had a partially working backport, but found some more work to do when I went back to use it more heavily,  hence, the continued work.

Thanks Ben and Roberto.

Where can I grab the backport?  I may need it, would appreciate it if I can get in touch with it.  Also it would be nice if its CVS or something.  Maybe we can pitch in.  We will be working on a 4.1.1 ACS site.  It would be nice to have ad_form.  But then again its ok to just use templating on it.  We have a tight schedule, but if its faster to backport and using ad_form then we might help.  But if its just faster to use plain old template::X we don't have enough resources to help.