Hi, I have been striving for weeks to be able to use the same HTML form for both editing existing objects, and entering new objects. What i did not want to do was to have two <INPUT> elements like this: <input type="text" name="input_name" tal:condition="exists:task/task_name" tal:attributes="value task/task_name" /> <input type="text" name="input_name" tal:condition="not:exists:task/task_name" tal:attributes="value string:Enter Name Here" /> To get around this, i am using the python script that returns the desired task instance from the ZCatalog. If the task_id parameter to the python script is 0 (or one could check to see if any ZCatalog brain instances are returned from the ZCatalog), i create a small dictionary to act as the transient object to hold whatever default data i need, like this: if (task_id == '0'): task = {'task_name' : 'Enter Name Here'} return task else: return context.tasks.Catalog({'id' : task_id})[0] Now, my <input> tag simply looks like this: <input type="text" name="input_name" tal:attributes="value task/task_name" /> Just wanted to put this out for the record, as i know some folks have asked me if i had found a solution yet. Cheers, mark