HTML::FormFu Beastmaster

I'm not a great fan of HTML::FormFu package.
Let me explain: HTML..FormFu does a lot of dirty job and give you an easy way to write down forms with a lot of business logic, but when you try to open is source code to do some customization it's quite a labyrinth with too much trolls and few indications about the right road.
In my opinion the module could be ten times more powerful giving an easy way to hack elements and modify them for new purposes.

Writing down Strehler interface I obviously had to manage a lot of forms. I wrote many of them following Strehler business logic to offer easy ways for javascript to work with them, this logic is something built on top on HTML::FormFu elements.

The category selector, probably the most complex widget I had to use, in forms configuration files is something like this:

    - type: Select
      id: category_selector
      name: category
      label: Category
      constraints:
        type: Required
        message: 'Category needed'
    - type: Select
      name: subcategory
      label: Sub-category
      id: subcat

Problem is that Strehler should give other developers the opportunity to implement their own entities and forms managing them. These forms could contain my category selector and I can't ask people to copy and paste all this code in their YML files. It's really clumsy and what if I change this structure? I should call them one by one and ask to change their files.

TIdy implementation wants that, when you need a category selector, you just add in your form configuration:

- type: "+Strehler::FormFu::Element::Category"

An ad hoc HTML::FormFu element.

There's not a real path to implement something like that, best way I found is to hack a HTML::FormFu::Element::Block nailing in it a fixed configuration with the elements of my category selector. The result is here.

You can do a lot of thngs exploiting the after BUILD of the HTML::FormFu::Element sub-classes, but you'll be always limited to the possibilities given by the class and its methods and, for example, you'll not have any chance to add custom configuration entries. So this pattern can be useful when you just want to make a package of some existing configurations, but nothing more.

Strehler::FormFu::Element::EntitySelect is something a bit more smart, as you can see here, but it's still an hack on Select I did after giving up on creating a FormFu::Element completely by myself.

Working on that, I drew a class diagram of HTML::FormFu (still 0.9 version), doing a bit of reverse engeneering on it. Here it is, as a gift from me.

The dumb code festival - 2

Let us spend some more words about forms and HTML::FormFu. In the preview chapter we just scratched the surface of it, doing something too essential to be enough, even in a dumb code festival.

Form is a way to have a structured stream of input coming from a human being to a machine. Human beings are bad doing data input. They insert bad data, they're lazy, they use funny mysterious languages like english and they're often stupid. You can't trust them, you have to constraint them, filter their input, inflate it and validate. (you would also bring them all and in the darkness bind them but this is not a tutorial suited for that).

Keeping us near the little example we're working on, a login, box, what kind of bad input we should manage? Luckly, very little, the only bad thing a user could try is to submit the form with no data inside. We could ignore this case, obviously it will led to a bad login, but let us make HTML::FormFu manage it for us.

Very little code added, just a contraints field with an element. The element is defined by a type and a message to me thrown up when constraint is violeted.

An interesting thing about: where that "Requeired" word come from? How can I know which words can do this kind of magic? Is there a sort of grimorioum for them?
Obviously not, the keyword you put in the type is just the name of a perl package, in the HTML::FormFu::Constraint namespace. The one invoked here is this.
What does this mean? It means that you can look at the available constraints just surfing the CPAN for contrainst classes and that you can use constraints created by your own just giving them the HTML::FormFu::Constraint namespace and putting them in the configuration file as "official" ones.
And yes, filters, inflaters and validators follow the same logic!

Just updating the form configuration you have managed the empty fields case. HTML::FormFu will reject the submission and will display errors on screen if the user try to submit without writing anything (lazy, lazy human!).

Now two important downsides:

1. Validation is server-side. The form is submitted, POST data elaborated, page reloaded with errors. If you're aiming to a validation with no page refresh and client-side javascript magic you're looking in the wrong place.
2. HTML produced by FormFu is the HTML it likes. You could not like it. You could think is a little old-style, too rude and simple. For example, I hate it doesn't use the Label for attribute.
   You can decide to work "around it" knowing how it is and putting javascript and CSS to make it looks good. The harder way is going down in the HTML::FormFu classes and redefine the rendering. This thing is not enough dumb for this article.

But... probably after so many words you want to see your form, don't you?

Open your Dancer App and render it!

The any key to acquire GET and POST will come useful in the future. Remember that the login.yml will be searched in you app root, the same directory where the Dancer config.yml is placed. Subdirectories are allowed (and recommended).
Remember to have in your template a [% form %] token where the box will be displayed.

This piece of code is very stupid, nearly useless, because there's no logic. But it's just the second part and we have a lot of things to talk about.