GUI Best Practice: When designing a webbased management interface, it is best to use a detail view or to use forms with values as primary view?

Question

To clarify the question, imagine having a paginated list with clients. When clicked on a specific client the system will open the 'view client x' view in order to show the client details.

Now, will this view be a 'simple' list which displays client details?

Or will this view be a form with input fields showing the client details and also allowing immediate changes to the details?

Please argument why and when we should use option 1 or option 2. Except for read-only or read-write permissions, I cant think of any other case why not to use option 2 as standard.

Answer 1

For something where the user will be entering mass data, having the table contain input fields is the best.

For something which having input fields in the table would be confusing (as it would loose visual semantic relevance with the other items grouped) then it is by far a worse option.

For instance, editing a user or a article on a website should use another page to edit. As there are going to be multiline inputs such as content or descriptions. Whereas a table where each row represents a item on a grocery receipt or debit/credit transaction then having a easy data entry table is by far king.

So it all depends on what you are trying to achieve - and what makes sense for the use case. There is no general one way wins every time, but rather one way wins for each time.