• Introduction
• Pattern Construction
• Tutorial
• Component Libraries
• Bootstrap v3
• Material UI

Introduction

The documentation in this section is for a side-project intended to simplify form and dialog generation. All of the related code lives in a repository called lore-forms.

However, unlike other form libraries you might be familiar with, lore-forms isn't really a library you consume, so much as a set of patterns you might like, built around a few small components. There are also some implementations of those patterns using two popular component libraries: Bootstrap and Material UI.

While the documentation for the "few small components" is severely lacking at the moment, there is a tutorial that demonstrates how to use those components, and also builds up those patterns from scratch. You can find that tutorial here.

The libraries provided by lore-forms simply implement that pattern on a larger scale, and provide actual forms and dialogs that can be used with Boostrap v3 and Material UI v0.20.

Why create a form library?

First off, there a number of form libraries out there. So why create another one?

The short answer is because while most form libraries try to make it easy to build forms, I wanted a library that could eliminate the need to write many forms.

Lore uses conventions to eliminate the boilerplate associated with REST API communication. And in many cases, those conventions are able to eliminate the need to write code for those REST APIs at all.

While using Lore in practice, I found that worked well, and it was easy to communicate with multiple REST APIs. So easy in fact, that it became clear the biggest time sink was creating forms and dialogs.

So I wanted to change that. There's so much similarity to forms and dialogs within an application; they have similar styling and behaviors. Hugely varied across applications, but very narrowly varied within a single application. So that's what I started trying to do; could I find patterns that could eliminate the need to create simple forms and dialogs, and make it easy to create more complex ones?

I also wanted to follow the same patterns that Lore uses; conventions to generate defaults, but with the ability to modify the configuration or override it as needed. Opinionated, but respectful.