What is the best way to display Item-Details like data
I've seen this type of dialog-subdialog design a lot and I still find it very easy to use and program. For example, we have a list of items in a ListView and double-clicking an item opens a dialog with all the item details populated. Users can view/edit the details and save them and all validation for an item happens on the item-details dialog. The main ListView is view only but there are buttons on the main dialog to create New item, Delete or re-order items.
It seems people have been moving away from this design because it opens multiple dialogs which is not considered a good UI design. So if the item-details dialog has a Choose File button then it will open another File Open dialog on top of the item-details dialog. I want to know if there are any UI guidelines related to this design for Win or Mac. The other design is to directly edit the list cells and make changes but that requires quite a bit of effort on the validation side to run perfectly.
Any pointers to UI guidelines related to this design will be appreciated. Thanks.