While creating a 'search' form I've been faced to an overwhelming complexity and I was wondering whether there is a well-known way to accomplish such task.

Fields of the form in question can be seen here: http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/artist.html#search

Here are a few issues I've been faced to and tried to solve with simple solutions though it led to a lot of copying and pasting in the end :

• When the user can select multiple choices for a field or not, I systematically had to create a collection of them, adding a 'null' value for the ability of ignoring that field. Also, as these are enumeration values they are not user-friendly to read and therefore needed an extra description field that will be shown instead on the UI. And at the end all this user-friendly values need to be converted back to the original object.

• Selection being made by the user, these choices need to be retrieved and for this, unfortunately in my case WPF data binding shown its limits. Example : when a user chooses items from a collection, there is no way to update the target object with these selections. (Obviously this is unrealistic as the object serves as a data source)

In the end it resumes to a lot of manual fetching from combo boxes, list boxes etc ... a middle-man object to receive all that and to this you have to add validation as well.

A strategy therefore becomes imperative as I will have to realise a couple of these complex forms.

I've been searching the web for solutions but beside extremely simple examples I found nothing relevant.

So the question is, is there an effective way that helps when creating complex user forms ?