Advice with Dynamic Forms in ASP.NET MVC

Question

I am working on rendering a dynamic form in an ASP.NET MVC view that will meet these requirements:

• Fields can be validated
• State is preserved when the form is invalid

I am looking into creating a custom model binder to achieve this. I am generally planning to do this:

1. Form fields are defined with these properties
   • Prompt (label next to fields)
   • Type (text, checkboxlist, radiolist, etc.)
   • Choices (for list fields)
   • IsRequired
   • RegularExpression (for text fields)
   • Display Options
   • Collection of field definitions are sent from the controller to the view
   • Fields are rendered into HTML and sent to the browser
   • Form is sent back to the server
   • A custom model binder binds the form to a collection of field definitions that now contains the submitted values
   • Each field is validated
   • If required -> must have a value
   • If RegEx -> must match
   • For each invalid field, an error message is added to modelstate
   • The controller decides what to do
   • If all fields are valid
     • Do whatever with the fields and their values
   • If 1 or more fields are invalid
     • Send the collection of fields back to the view
     • Render the fields again, with their previously attempted values
     • Show the validation summary

I'm not sure if I am doing this in the best or easiest way. Will this approach give me a lot of problems or even work? What can I do to improve upon it?

Answer 1

I wrote a class library that basically does exactly what my psuedocode in my question describes. It works great.

EDIT:

I finally got around to cleaning up my class library. I have added some new features and created a fairly well documented demo web application.

All of this is hosted here on CodePlex. I hope this helps someone.