I don't know if the title is the best term, for what i want, but here is the thing
We are re-developing a app that consists basically of rich crud pages, the application will be accessed from many countries, and each of the country has some specific fields, data validation between the fields and validation against other data in the database. Some even have entire sections not visible to other countries.
Today, every screen of the app has a bunch of ifs statements that controls the visibility and data validation of the form. needless to say the maintainability is very low and high error prone. The application will be available for even more countries we have today and the new implementation for each one is very costly.
I need a framework/pattern/trick to accomplish a dynamic form generation/handling based on the culture of the logged user
One of my thoughts would be store the culture-dependent fields/section as metadata in the DB, and generate the form accordingly; Another idea would be to develop the pages as a step-by-step wizard, and load the steps as required for that culture/country
EDIT: The application is .Net 4.0, could be in Web Forms or MVC, not quite decided yet
I like the metadata in the DB. You could avoid the dynamic generation, in the page put all controls / fields. Then, interpret the metadata information and remove those controls that doesn't correspond to the current country.
Comment aside: In now-days webs where is very common to use a lot of client-side logic (javascript, mainly jQuery), I'd recommend MVC.