Determining the <container> selected

brianmat

I am trying to build a template to allow our users to build an e-mail form. I want them to be able to select the form elements and basic properties. Here is my current template (attached). This may be bad design, so I am looking for style feedback.

Basically, I want to be able to determine what type of element they selected (textbox, textarea, select, etc) within my tpl.

I can loop through the elements with:

<w_iterate var='element' list='dcr.Fields' iteration='element_index'>

But I want to be able to see within this loop what type of container was selected so that I can build the form. I can do:

<iw_value name="element.formItem.textarea.cols" />

But this only returns a value if they select a textarea and populate the cols element. I cannot check for .textarea ne '' because that does not seem to evaluate properly.

Any feedback would be appreciated since I cannot find much information on using containers.