On 9/3/06, Frando (Franz Heinzmann) <frando@xcite-online.de> wrote:
I think by extending the FormAPI concept to a Data API we can ease and simplify drupal module development quite a lot. By adding some more "magic", as some scaffolding here and there or considering the fAPI arrays not as description of forms but as data models, lots of things (as different methods of interacting with a website, e.g. XML-RPC or import/export modules) would be far easier to realize.
The Import / Export API module (my Summer of Code project - <http://drupal.org/project/importexportapi>) goes some way towards achieving this. A big part of the module is its "data definition" system, which allows any entity within Drupal to be represented as a structured array. This is basically a "data API", and it is certainly a candidate for how we could implement a "model" layer in core. My implementation of a data model is a bit different to the examples that Adrian has given, but I think that the general direction is the same. My work probably contains a lot of stuff that is specific to data models for import/export, which won't be necessary in core. Hopefully we'll be able to take the best of everyone's ideas, when it comes time to actually coding the data model layer that will (most likely) form the new foundation of FAPI 3.0. Oh, wait... I mean, DAPI... whatever :P Cheers, Jaza.