Best way to populate an edit form from a database

[eluser]dmorin[/eluser]
Thanks for replying. That's a lot like my solution. The issue I see with yours is if you have php notices turned on, you're going to get a lot of errors because you're trying to reference array indexes that doesn't exist in the case of the new form. The work around is to do something like

Code:

<?php set_value('first_name', (isset($form['first_name'])) ? $form['first_name'] : ''); ?>

This starts to get really ugly though. It seems like we need some kind of validation defaults function that we can pass in an array and it can loop through an assign each field a "default" value.