Dynamic turbogears widgets and validation.

If you are using TurboGears widgets and have a need to build widgets dynamically within the context of a request, it simply doesn't work. Well, that's not entirely true. Here is a case where it is.

Say you are displaying a form to a user that displays a selectbox widget. This selectbox widget contains a list of languages supported by your application that the user can choose. For this, you would use a TurboGears widget. Now, say that you also want the default selection to be the language of the requesting client. This is a case where the widget would need to be dynamically constructed within the context of the request.

So far, so good. We can build TurboGears widgets in web controllers no problem. Now, what if we want to enforce some validation on the language selector? We use a TurboGears validator to say this widget may not be empty say. Well, when the widget validation fails, so does your widget because it can no longer be constructed. This is because the validation logic is taken care of for the developer outside the controller.

This is an obscure case but it is nonetheless realizable. Perhaps the TurboGears validation decorator should offer more flexibility in how widget failure validation is handled. Maybe this is already possible?