FuelPHP Forums

I'm currently trying to rewrite a company web app using FuelPHP and am getting a bit flustered trying to determine how things can/should fit together. I think I may just be getting hung up with my DRY obsession. Sometimes separate but similar functionality needs to be tweaked in such a way that you're forced to repeat yourself, I'm trying to fight it at every angle but perhaps it's a losing battle. I'm starting on my first form that will POST to create a new database entry and decided to take the ORM route. Below is roughly the road I've taken to get where I am right now. First, I see that you can(should?) list all your columns in the $_properties array of your model. You can also add your form details and validation info, cool! I'll do just that then and let Fieldset::forge() figure out what to do. Wait, I don't want the dateCreated to show up on the creation form. I'll just set form type to false like the docs say. Hmm, label still shows without a field, I'll set the label to false and now it's gone. What if I want it to show in the future though for an edit form? Why does Fieldset still create empty table row HTML for fields that aren't displayed? OK, maybe that isn't a good route to go, I'll just manually specify every field I want for creation in its own separate function and pass that in with the add_model() call. That works, now to validate it. I should be able to populate a model instance with Model_mymodel::forge(Input::post()). OK, now to validate using all those validation rules I set in $_properties(). Check docs and online tutorials, everyone is manually adding each field to the validation instance. Alright, guess I can do that too. Surely I can just pass my populated module to the validation instance though. Not sure, in one of the tutorials listed here (http://www.trovster.com/blog/2011/03/fuelphp-forms-and-validation/), the author manually sets each property on his model while manually running validation on each input. Docs say you can pass a fieldset instance to Validation::forge(), so on the POST request, I have to first fill the fieldset with the values, then pass to validation, if it then passes, I can fill my model so I can run save()? At that point, why even bother with $_properties()? I'm trying to figure out as much as I can myself, often diving in to the source code of fuel to figure things out that aren't covered in the docs or tutorials but there's only so much I can get from there. I'd like to know how someone very familiar with the capabilities of the current Fuel framework would do this. Thanks.