Great responses Anthony and DenesL. I agree with shartha that you 2 should be commended for supporting this group as well as you do.
shartha, I have used factory a lot in my work and had settled on using custom forms mostly everywhere in my views. This was a style thing that I gravitated towards and not anything more formal. I tended not to specify forms in my controllers, but that's not because I condemned the practice. It's more likely that I wasn't educated as to why I should prefer to specify forms in my controller. Since my forms are customized, like SPAN(form.custom.begin,form_stuff,form.custom.end), and defined in my views, I also tended to specify my triggers in the same place. So I'd have SELECT(...,_onchange="""ajax('...');return false;""" in my view rather than my controller. My switch to a components approach has me rethinking things, however. Since componentized forms are much simpler, I believe I no longer need to customize as much. Bottom line, I am very much interested in hearing how others do this. Question to readers, do you specify your forms and triggers in controllers or views and why?