Next generation forms in javascript
Project description
The gocept.jsform distribution
JavaScript library for simple creation of forms in your clients browser. It just needs a JSON datastructure and creates a form with auto saving fields from it.
Uses knockout for data-binding, json-template for templating and jquery for DOM manipulation and ajax calls.
Requirements
If you have a server using fanstatic to include resources, just do:
from gocept.jsform.resource import jsform jsform.need()
This will require all needed resources like jquery, knockout, json-template, widgets and the code to setup and run gocept.jsform itself.
Without fanstatic, you should include the following resources by hand:
helpers.js
widgets.js
jsform.js
You can find them in the resources directory in this package.
Usage
All you need to start creating forms is:
<div id="replace_this_with_my_form"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var my_form = new gocept.jsform.Form('replace_this_with_my_form');
my_form.load('/form_data.json');
</script>
This will inject the form in the container with the id replace_this_with_my_form, load the form data via ajax from the url form_data.json and create input fields according to the content of form_data.json.
form.load() accepts javascript objects as data or a url (like in the example above). It then guesses, which field widget to load by means of the datatype of your field:
my_form.load(
{firstName: '', // will result in a input field with type="text"
title: [{id: 'mr', value: 'Mister'},
{id: 'mrs', value: 'Miss', selected: true}], // will result in a select box
needs_glasses: false}); // will result in a checkbox
gocept.jsform comes with basic templates for these three use cases. Of cource you can provide your own templates for either the form or the fields itself. Please refer to the customization section for further information.
Tests
The tests are written in jasmine and run using selenium webdriver.
Customization
There are various options which can be passed to customize the HTML output and the behaviour of gocept.jsform.
Providing a save url for the server
The great thing about gocept.jsform is, that it automatically pushes changes in your form fields to the server. For that to work you need to specify a url where gocept.jsform should propagate changes to:
var form = new gocept.jsform.Form('my_form', {save_url: '/save.json'});
On every change, the following information is pushed to that url:
id: the name of the field (e.g. firstname)
value: the new value for that field (e.g. Bob)
The server should now validate the given data. If saving went fine, it must return {status: 'success'}, if there was a (validation-) error, it must return e.g. {status: 'error', msg: 'Not a valid email address'}. The error will then be displayed next to the widget.
Customizing the form template
The default behaviour is to simply append every new field in the form tag. If you would like to customize the order of your fields or just need another boilerplate for you form, you can use a custom form template with containers for all or just some of the fields:
var template = new jsontemplate.Template(
['<form method="POST" action="{action}" id="{form_id}">',
'<table><tr><td class="firstname"><span id="firstname" /></td>',
'<td class="lastname"><span id="lastname" /></td></tr></table>',
'</form>'].join(''),
{default_formatter: 'html'});
var form = new gocept.jsform.Form('my_form', {form_template: template});
form.load({firstname: 'Max', lastname: 'Mustermann'});
This will replace the span containers with id firstname and lastname with the appropriate input fields.
Customizing field widgets
You can either customize widgets by their type (e.g. all fields rendered for strings) or customize single widgets by their name.
Customization by field type
You can overwrite the default templates by providing your own templates in the options dict passed during form initialization:
var form = new gocept.jsform.Form(
'my_form', {string_template: my_input_template,
object_template: my_select_template,
boolean_template: my_checkbox_template});
For every string data, your input template would be rendered instead of the default input text field. Same for lists and boolean values.
Customization by field name
Imagine you want checkboxes instead of a select field:
var template = new jsontemplate.Template(
['<div class="title">Titel:',
'{.repeated section value}',
' <div>',
' <input type="radio" name="{name}" value="{id}" class="{id}"',
' data-bind="checked: {name}" /> {value}',
' </div>',
'{.end}',
'</div>'].join(''), {default_formatter: 'html'});
var form = new gocept.jsform.Form('my_form');
form.load({title: [{id: 'mr', value: 'Mr.'},
{id: 'mrs', value: 'Mrs.'}]},
{title: {template: template}});
You can pass the load method a JS object containing customizations for each field. One of these customization options is template, which results in rendering two checkboxes instead of the default select box in the above example.
You can also specify a label or other options for the fields:
var template = new jsontemplate.Template(
['{label}: <input type="text" name="{name}" value="{default}"',
' data-bind="value: {name}" {readonly} />'].join(''),
{default_formatter: 'html', undefined_str: ''});
var form = new gocept.jsform.Form('my_form');
form.load({firstname: 'Sebastian'},
{firstname: {template: template,
label: 'First name',
default: 'Max'}});
Developing gocept.jsform
- Author:
Sebastian Wehrmann <sw@gocept.com> Maik Derstappen <md@derico.de>
- Online documentation:
- PyPI page:
- Issues:
- Source code:
- Current change log:
https://bitbucket.org/gocept/gocept.jsform/raw-file/tip/CHANGES.txt
Change log for gocept.jsform
0.4 (2013-08-27)
Made it possible to define templates as template files on file system.
0.3 (2013-08-27)
Add events after-load and after-save.
Fix JSON serialization to be able to handle Knockout observables.
Added reload functionality to the form class.
0.2 (2013-08-26)
Made it possible to preselect values in arrays when the form is rendered.
Changed form submit behaviour:
Default submit type is not POST instead of GET. (Change it with the save_type option)
Data is now submitted as JSON type.
0.1 (2013-08-17)
initial release
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
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