...And in general, I really appreciate your blog posts about web development; tremendous amount of learning for me. If you could only post more often :)

Thanks for the nice writeup and everything else you've done :)

If one doesn't successfully pass the validation step, ones browser is sitting with a form (with errors) on /comment/post/. This URL is invalid for any followup GET.

If they GET that page, you get a big nasty error: AttributeError: 'CommentController' object has no attribute 'form_result'

Likewise, if they ARE successful, and they reload, or GET that page, the same thing happens. That's easier, as it's a pretty standard practice to redirect upon success (if only to avoid the dual-submit problem).

The former is more troublesome; it could be try/excepted, but that's a little nasty; bad URLs shouldn't be this easy to find.

But, I know where you're coming with formencode switching action dispatch on you. I don't like that either.

I DO like when the same URL is mapped into two different actions via their request method via routes. For example, the url /comment/89/edit can lead to an action called 'edit' for GET (which returns a form) and to an action called 'update" for POST (which does some validation, database stuff, whatever). This ends up working very nicely.

But I've learned from the more important meat of your little project; I like this way of making forms, and I think that we can work out our own quirky url-dispatch neuroses on our own time.

Thanks.

if errors: request.environ['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'GET'

@rest.dispatch_on(POST='_mako_post')
def index(self):
    return render('/mako_helpers.html')

@mako_validate(schema=CommentForm, input_controller=index)
def _mako_post(self):
    c.name = self.form_result['name']
    return render('/thanks.html')

On submit this leads to a loop between dispatch and input_controller. With @validate(form='index', schema=CommentForm()) on Pylons 0.9.6 this used to work.

Any ideas?

I would bet there are a LOT of interactive web companies that are looking to use Python in New York. I think that more blogs posts that highlight how Python is a different beast than PHP and Java would be helpful. PHP is pretty efficient for "throw away" projects, but often those projects could be reused later if they were written in Python.

Although I am not currently living in New York, I think it would be good to get the word out that web development with Flash, Javascript and Python is a killer stack. That is currently what I am doing.

Noah

Thanks!

Mako does the job very well. Similarly we used mako to generate our device configuration in very nicer XML content which is used for millions for people across the world to configure the flow meters.

Though I hack Pylons, SqlAlchemy and Mako at home, we use Python very rare in our office. I am marketing Python and Mako at our office for code generation.

Thanks a lot Mike.

SyntaxException: (SyntaxError) invalid syntax (, line 1) ...

I tried this with Mako version 1.8 and 2.2

Thinking it might be a version problem, I made a virtualenv without access to site-wide site-packages and installed formhelper into it with dependencies, and ran that.

I get: ImportError: cannot import name StatusCodeRedirect

So I forced the virtualenv to install pylons dev version, which works. But now I can't tell which bit is necessary to try out your custom tag trick.

I can import a namespace, and access its members, but through the old ${newspace.member(name='foo')} syntax, not which still causes a syntax error.

Great idea, I'm looking forward to getting it running ;-)