Best way to populate an edit form from a database

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
What I've done to solve this problem is use a method called getRecord() in my models. It will always return a "record" array and in the case of a new record, will simply populate empty field values. No complaints when the views are rendered.

The set_value() method of the form helper also appears to gracefully handle the problem of attempting to read/print unpopulated variables on your form. You just need to pass a default value to use if the variable you're attempting to access is not defined. It seems to work a lot like the sql function coalesce().