Hi all,
For my current project, I’ve been thinking about edit forms and whether
or
not I need a separate edit action at all.
If I have a show action that say displays a users information and this
information is layed out nicely so that it’s nice to read etc.
If I require a separate edit action, I need to re-layout all the
information
so that its layed out in a similar manner but with form input fields.
At
least I think that kind of consistency would be beneficial to reduce
learning required by the user.
To me this doesn’t seem very DRY both on the part of the code, and also
on
the part of the user since they have to identify with two presentations
of
the same information.
In comes the in_place editors. If I use these then my show view becomes
my
edit view as well, so the user only needs to get used to one set of
information display.
I have thought of some issues with this though as well. This may not be
a
familiar format with the user for editing information on the web, and
this
may not be useful if a user is used to adding new information rather
than
just looking at it, although the same view could potentially be used for
new
entries as well. This could also cause issues with validatation that
may
prevent it from being workable a the moment.
Now for my question 
Is it a reasonable idea to basically eliminate seperate edit, and maybe
new
actions / views, in favor of i_p_e?
Is there a big downside that I haven’t yet considered that would detract
from the user ( and coder ) experience?