An isomorphic form-handling library for React.
(Formerly a direct port of the Django framework's django.forms
library)
-
react-formal - uses a schema and leverages React's context feature to make it really simple to render fields and error messages
-
redux-form - manages form state for you, leaving you do the rendering exactly as you wish
Newforms can be used on the server, or bundled for the client using an npm-compatible packaging system such as Browserify or webpack.
npm install newforms
var forms = require('newforms')
By default, newforms will be in development mode. To use it in production mode,
set the environment variable NODE_ENV
to 'production'
when bundling. To
completely remove all development mode code, use a minifier that performs
dead-code elimination, such as UglifyJS.
The browser bundle exposes a global forms
variable and expects to
find global React
variable to work with.
The uncompressed bundle is in development mode, so will log warnings about potential mistakes.
You can find it in the /dist directory.
-
newforms-bootstrap - Bootstrap 3 integration & grid form form layout components.
-
newforms-gridforms - Grid Forms form layout components.
A quick introduction to defining and using newforms Form objects.
The starting point for defining your own forms is Form.extend()
.
Here's a simple (but incomplete!) definition of a type of Form you've probably seen dozens of times:
var SignupForm = forms.Form.extend({
username: forms.CharField(),
email: forms.EmailField(),
password: forms.CharField({widget: forms.PasswordInput}),
confirmPassword: forms.CharField({widget: forms.PasswordInput}),
acceptTerms: forms.BooleanField({required: true})
})
A piece of user input data is represented by a Field
, groups
of related Fields are held in a Form
and a form input which will
be displayed to the user is represented by a Widget
. Every
Field has a default Widget, which can be overridden.
Forms provide helpers for rendering labels, user inputs and validation errors for their fields. To get you started quickly, newforms provides a React component which use these helpers to render a basic form structure.
At the very least, you must wrap rendered form contents in a <form>
,
provide form controls such as a submit button and hook up handling of form
submission:
var Signup = React.createClass({
render: function() {
return <form onSubmit={this._onSubmit}>
<forms.RenderForm form={SignupForm} ref="signupForm"/>
<button>Sign Up</button>
</form>
},
// ...
Rendering helpers attach event handlers to the inputs they render, so getting user input data is handled for you.
The RenderForm
component handles creating a form instance for you, and
setting up automatic validation of user input as it's given.
To access this form instance later, make sure the component has a ref
name.
The final step in using a Form is validating when the user attempts to submit.
First, use the ref
name you defined earlier to get the form instance via the
RenderForm
component's getForm()
method.
Then call the form's validate()
method to ensure every field in the form is
validated against its current user input.
If a Form is valid, it will have a cleanedData
object containing validated
data, coerced to the appropriate JavaScript data type when appropriate:
propTypes: {
onSignup: React.PropTypes.func.isRequired
},
_onSubmit: function(e) {
e.preventDefault()
var form = this.refs.signupForm.getForm()
var isValid = form.validate()
if (isValid) {
this.props.onSignup(form.cleanedData)
}
}
})
There's an obvious validation not being handled by our form: what if the passwords don't match?
This is a cross-field validation. To implement custom, cross-field validation
add a clean()
method to the Form definition:
clean: function() {
if (this.cleanedData.password &&
this.cleanedData.confirmPassword &&
this.cleanedData.password != this.cleanedData.confirmPassword) {
throw forms.ValidationError('Passwords do not match.')
}
}