[development] FAPI's future

[Neil Drumm]

On 8/8/07, Jeff Eaton <jeff at viapositiva.net> wrote:
>
> On Aug 8, 2007, at 5:47 AM, Dries Buytaert wrote:
>
> > For this work, each form needs (i) a human-readable name that can
> > be shown on a configuration page and (ii) all submit buttons
> > require some semantic meta data as well.  Right now, 'Submit' can
> > be both 'create' or 'update'.
>
> This is a good case for hook_forms() being a requirement, not an
> optional mechanism. Right now, users can just call drupal_get_form
> ('lovely_delicious_bacon') and FAPI will go about its business
> happily, checking for a lovely_delicious_bacon() function, then
> checkig hook_forms() to see if lovely_delicious_bacon was really
> mapped to my_module_bacon_form().
>
> If we were to make even the simple forms require the use of hook_forms
> (), we would have a very simple transition and an easy place to put
> descriptive metadata. ("What kind of form is this? What module does
> it belong to?" Etc.)

This would add another step to building forms and fragment the form
code. Keeping a form's code all in one place is good and makes forms
easier to code.

Another possibility is using consistent function names for forms. This
is how I removed the index of update functions that used to exist in
update.php, I required the update function names to follow a pattern
and finding all of them was done easily.

-- 
Neil Drumm
http://delocalizedham.com