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form-for

Type less, do more. React forms made easy.

import { Form, Field } from "form-for";

const user = new User();

<Form for={user} onSubmit={...}>
  <Field name="firstName" />
  <Field name="lastName" />

  <Field name="email" />
  <Field name="password" />

  <button>Submit</button>
</Form>

Just wanna play with it? Check out the demo

• Live
• Codesandbox Demo
• Repository

Key Features

• Convention over configuration - it just works for most cases
• Seemless integration between custom and HTML 5 Validation
  • Custom validations are set using setCustomValidity for better browser integration
  • HTML 5 validation errors are provided to the component to be displayed and have better accessibility and UX
• Built-in support for nested fields
  • Often used for array fields
• Validation among fields
  • Often used for validations like password confirmation
• Optimized rerenders with MobX

Install

📦 2.7k gzipped

npm install --save form-for

or https://unpkg.com/form-for/umd

Plug 'n play state management

• React setState (the default one)
• MobX Binding - Demo

Why there is no Redux binding?

Form states in general should not be managed by Redux. You'll most likely be just fine with the default state management. You can get the form data through onChange(data) and onSubmit(event, data).

Plug 'n play components

• Base components
• Bootstrap 4 components

Schema

Forms are created based on a given schema. There are three ways to provide the form schema:

Decorator

The @field decorator may or may not have parameters.

import { field } from 'form-for';

export default class User {
  @field name; // type defaults to 'text'

  @field({ type: 'email', required: true })
  email;

  @field({ type: 'todoItem[]' })
  todoItems;
}

const user = new User();

<Form for={user}>
  <Field name="..."/>
</Form/>

Property in the object

export default class User {
  schema = {
    name: {}, // type defaults to 'text'
    email: { type: 'email', required: true }
    todoItems: { type: 'todoItem[]' }
  };
}

const user = new User();

<Form for={user}>
  <Field name="..."/>
</Form/>

Schema on the <Form>

const schema = {
  name: {}, // type defaults to 'text'
  email: { type: 'email', required: true }
  todoItems: { type: 'todoItem[]' }
}

const user = {};

<Form for={user} schema={schema}>
  <Field name="..."/>
</Form/>

Properties on the <Field>

Properties directly to the <Field> tag override the schema properties.

<Form for={user} ...>
  <Field name="..." type="special_type_for_this_form_only" placeholder="Special" />
</Form>

Note: Try avoiding this one, as it makes your forms longer and may lead to code duplication.

Connect components

import { Field } from "form-for";
import React from "react";

class Component extends React.Component {
  ...
}

Field.connect('type', Component);

Data management

You can get the form data through onChange(data) and onSubmit(event, data)

handleChange = data => {
  // console.log(data);
};

handleSubmit = (event, data) => {
  // console.log(data);
};

<Form onChange={handleChange} onSubmit={handleSubmit}>
  ...
</Form>;

Validation

Validation takes into consideration both custom validations and HTML 5 validations respectively.

HTML 5 Validation

You can make use of the HTML 5 validation attributes, such as required, min, max and minLength. The HTML 5 validation messages are provided to the connected component, so it can display the error in a nice way.

const schema = { age: { type: 'number', max: 10, min: 2, required: true } };

<Form for={object} schema={schema}>
  <Field name="age" required={true} />
</Form>;

Named validation function

import { field } from 'form-for';

export default class User {
  @field({ error: 'validateName' })
  name;

  validateName(object, name) {
    if (this.name === 'Nobody') return 'Nobody is not a name'; // 💎 Recommended
    if (object[name] === 'Nobody') return 'Nobody is not a name'; // Same thing, but using the argument

    // Returning undefined, false or null means there's no custom error, so form-for will check for HTML 5 errors
  }
}

Standalone validation function

function validateAge(object, name) {
  if (this.age === 999) return 'Are you this old???'; // 💎 Recommended
  if (object[name] === 999) return 'Are you this old???'; // Same thing, but using the arguments

  // Returning undefined, false or null means there's no custom error, so form-for will check for HTML 5 errors
}

<Field name="age" error={validateAge}>

Error string

this.state = { nameError: 'invalid name' };
<Field name="name" error={this.state.nameError}>

Skip validation

If for some reason you need to skip validations, just use the noValidate prop.

<Form noValidate>...</Form>

Touched

The touched property provided to a field component means that a field has been focused at least once. This is used to display error messages only after the user has gotten to an input.

Touched on Mount

There may be cases when you want to display the errors from the beginning, even before the user touches a field. For that, you can use touchOnMount on <Form>;

<Form touchOnMount>...</Form>

Creating components

If you're using flow for typing, you can import the component props: import type { ComponentProps } from "form-for";. PR's for Typescript typings are welcome.

These are the fields provided to a component: (the ? means it may or may not be provided)

type ComponentProps = {
  name: string,
  type?: string,
  error?: string,
  touched: boolean,
  value: any,
  onMount: Function,
  onFocus: Function,
  onChange: Function
};

Any other attributes provided through the <Field> tag, @field or the schema will also be available through the props.

Here's an example:

// @flow

import * as React from 'react';
import type { ComponentProps } from 'form-for';

export default class Input extends React.PureComponent<ComponentProps> {
  input: ?HTMLInputElement;

  componentDidMount() {
    this.props.onMount(this.input);
  }

  render() {
    const { error, ...props } = { ...this.props };

    // onMount and touched are not used in this case, but they need to be deleted so they don't get passed down to the DOM
    delete props.onMount;
    delete props.touched;

    return <input ref={el => (this.input = el)} aria-invalid={!!error} {...props} />;
  }
}

• Check out form-for-components for handy base components.
• Check out form-for-bootstrap-components for ready to go Bootstrap 4 components.

Validation Events

These events must be psased down to the field, so form-for can properly handle the validations.

For all the events, if value and error are not provided they are guessed from the event.target

• onMount(target: ?HTMLElement)

This event is used to setCustomValidity, prevent the form from being submitted with pending custom validations and allowing to focus on the field with error.

• onFocus(event: Event)

• onChange(event: Event, value?: any, error?: any)

If you're building a fancy component, such as a image cropper, you may need to provide the actual value and error, unless these can be guessed from event.target.

Here's an example: https://github.com/form-for/demo/blob/master/src/fields/Image/ImageField.js

Helpers

It's recommend to look at the form-for-component-helpers package. It provides functions to facilitate creating components, specially when it comes to guessing labels.

Nested fields

form-for makes it a breeze to nest fields. You may have a User class that has todoItems, as list of TodoItem instances.

Here's an example: https://github.com/form-for/demo/blob/master/src/fields/TodoItems/TodoItemsField.js

If you're using the MobX binding, please check https://github.com/form-for/form-for/tree/master/packages/mobx-form-for#nested-fields

Flow support

All form-for packages are built with flow and provides support from the get go. Flow will automatically include typings when you import form-for modules. Although you do not need to import the types explicitly, you can still do it like this: import type { ... } from 'form-for'.

To use the flow typings shipped with form-for packages:

• In .flowconfig, you cannot ignore node_modules.
• In .flowconfig, you cannot import it explicitly in the [libs] section.
• You do not need to install library definition using flow-typed.

Roadmap

• Typescript typings

• mobx-state-tree binding

• In depth blog post about form-for

• More examples

  • Pure react
  • Redux
  • Async validation
  • Calculation

• Egghead.io course

Resources

• Contributing Guide

• Code of Conduct

• The logo was created by Xicons.co and can be found here.