RFC Web Forms and Rebol

• AltWebForm Experimental v0.2.0

I’ve been considering changing the behaviour of my AltWebForm module. Currently the deserialiser extrapolates meaning from keys to produce deeper data structures:

post.title=Something&post.tag=one&post.tag=two

Becomes:

post [
    title "Something"
    tag ["one" "two"]
]

The first consideration is that a repetitive tag implies a block instead of a single value. This causes a problem in validation as any value can become a block where a single value is required:

post.title=First&post.title=Second

My first proposed change then is that a repetitive value overwrites the previous value, so the above becomes:

post [title "Second"]

The second consideration is how then to handle values that are legitimate collections?

My second proposed change then is that a key that represents a block of values end in a period:

post.tag.=one
post.tag.=one&post.tag.=two

Becomes:

post [tag ["one"]]
post [tag ["one" "two"]]

Respectively.

Update 15th Oct, 2015

As AltWebForm is a key component with the QuarterMaster framework, I have one other consideration for how this works. Currently QM uses smart tags to build form controls manually. For rich keys such as the above, I can use paths that are translated into a webform-encoded friendly name. The addition of the extra dot presents a challenge in how to represent the array ‘bit’:

<%! field post/title "Title Here" %>
<%! field post/tag/. "one" %>
<%! field post/tag/. "two" %>

Is one possible way to handle things.

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