design pattern to hide/show form elements

Question

I'm new to design patterns so my question can sound bit crazy.

I have a web form with a lot of controls on it. Depending on the permissions User has and form status some of the controls needs to be editable or readonly or hidden and so on.

I was wandering about what design pattern should I implement to sort all this mess?

I was thinking about Chain of Responsibility, so each Link in a chain will be responsible for some logic.

Am I on the right way?

Answer 1

While there are probably many ways to approach your problem, it's hard to recommend anything without more specifics about the use case.

However, it sounds like you might have a wider issue to consider. It's very rarely the case that there is a business need to apply the kind of fine-grained permissions you are talking about. I've often seen developers going overboard on creating incredibly flexible roles/rights authorization systems - but think about the problem from a business point of view. Typically there are a few roles whose needs (rights) change very little over time - and each role is trying to perform different tasks.

Could you solve this problem more simply by introducing a form per role and/or status that is optimized for the task at hand? You may find this is easier to maintain in the long run, and clearer for your users.