Well, maybe there's more to it than I wrote originally.

I imagine a Perl script with some generic form generation routines that take their directions from some specs held within the database.

For example, for field_1:

• at creation is to be displayed as a drop-down on the creation screen, with possible values a-to-z,
• not be editable on a record-update screen
• in a listing of records from the table, not be displayed if the user is of user_type=X.

These parts of the database specification are going to be littered here and there throughout the system, in conditionals and template layouts. What I imagine is having these specs centralized within the database somewhere and then a generic screen form element generator script that takes its direction from those specs.

Mmmmmm....I'm beginning to imagine a table of table column specs.....

Table: specs
table_name, field_name, creation_form_type, editable, view_types,....
[download]

Something like that....but I fear a great deal of querying for every page generation.