# Forms Generated from Structures **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [April 18, 2007, 8:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/forms-generated-from-structures/92375 "2007-04-18T20:03:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jmaenpaa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/9de053/32.png) [@jmaenpaa](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jmaenpaa)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2007, 8:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/forms-generated-from-structures/92375/1 "2007-04-18T20:03:52Z")
Greeting All: I am writing this in hopes of not reinventing the wheel. To me this seems like such a good idea that someone else has thought of and implemented it already. Problem. I am tracking a bunch of user configurable “Things.” Depending on how the these Things have a state that is effected by a number of different factors including the state of things “around” them. Each thing can be configured by the user via a form, but the options on that form will change both in kind and allowable value based on the state of the Thing. Solution. I didn’t want to have to create HTML forms for all the states of all things by hand, so I came up with a data structure that described what type of information I needed and what allowable return values were. With this structure I could programmatically create HTML forms, and also use the same structure to validate the returned values. These structures obviously could be manipulated in Ruby like ways (Whatever that means). Unfortunately, I’m a hobby programmer and while the concept sounded good, the implementation is currently … Um… VERY Alpha. (And not easy to use either) Question. I realized that this seemed to be a very obvious idea and that there would be lots of smart people out there who would have already done all the hard work. My question is who are they and where to I find the manifestation of their brilliance? JFMILLER