[Typo3-dev] uptospeed: flex DS preprocessing

[Luite van Zelst]

Hi everybody,

it's been awhile since I was more involved in typo3, and currently I'm 
trying to get up to speed. Celebrating the upcoming 10.000 downloads of 
the lz_gallery extension I'm working on a completely new version with 
cleaner code, t3lib_db compliance and flex forms.

I've been trying to read all available information (well, typo3 core 
api) on the subject of flexforms - If you can instantly point me to some 
other docs - please do.

The idea is to use a single flexform field to store descriptions of the 
pictures in a directory. To do so need to generate the DS on the fly: 
look at a directory, read a list of files and generate a text field for 
every file and put inside a correct xml DS. This is the easy part. The 
hard part is to implement DS preprocessing!

What would be the way to go?
*) is using a user field inside a flexform (which call's a flexform 
function in t3lib_tceforms for every file) an option? any hints?
*) should I override t3lib_tceforms (xclass) to add the preprocess 
option to a flex field?
*) it would be even better to override t3lib_BEfunc::getFlexFormDS but 
that class/file has no XCLASS code ? :-( I know it is no longer 
fashionable to use XCLASS but it would make me very happy if we'd keep 
backwards compatibility with this concept!
*) should I ask Kasper for a hook? (and wait for the next typo3 release)
*) ..other ideas..?

It's just that in principle the flexform would eleminate the need for me 
to write a backend module which I wouldn't especially wish to do.

thanx, regards,

Luite van Zelst.