Deform Retail Form Rendering
Written by Eric Rasmussen on May 28, 2013.
If you write web applications, chances are you’ve come across the dubious entities known as forms. The delicate interplay between html, css, javascript, server side code, databases, and expectations from your users cannot be understated. So let me say it plainly: forms are hard.
There’s simply no way to write an all encompassing form library for every use case. Every form library is going to make tough choices and tradeoffs that affect its usability to you as a developer, its extensibility, and its UI for your users. Often times it can be difficult to learn a form library in its entirety because of this complexity, and that’s likely one reason many programmers end up writing their own instead.
In the python world we now have over 100 form validation and related libraries on pypi*. The power of choice can be debilitating, so I’ll make it simple. You should learn deform.
When you drill down past all the complexities, the core abstraction behind forms is mapping user input to code. One way to do that is writing and validating schemas. deform achieves this by building on the excellent colander library. And while no form library will cover all use cases, deform has hooks in all the right places to make it extremely flexible and extensible. If you haven’t tried it before, start here:
Of course, there’s just one catch: deform’s tradeoff was developer flexibility over highly customizable front-end forms. Typically you would build up a deform.Form object, render it to html with a pre-defined template, and pass it off wholesale to your page template. This makes front-end customizations a lot of work because you’d need to create separate form templates for each (in addition to your page templates) and override deform assets to use the correct templates.
For that reason I’d only been using deform for use cases where pre-generated forms were a reasonable tradeoff. The good news is the library has a new feature called retail form rendering (named for customer facing/retail website forms) that lets you pass the Form object to your page template instead. This may sound like a small addition to the library, but the implications are huge. You can now access and manipulate Form and field objects directly in your page templates, giving you full control over how to style them.
This features deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting, so I created a demo site in pyramid to highlight some of its capabilities:
Please feel free to open an issue on github if you have any forms you’d like to see, or you can even issue a pull request showing off new forms.
Until you actually dig into deform’s API, it’s a little hard to appreciate just how expressive it is. Like many libraries that tackle hard problems, it requires a lot of effort. It may even look like it’d be more effort to learn it than roll your own. But likely it isn’t, and you’ll be doing yourself a service investing that time in deform.
*In the pypi listing, deform is described rather inconspicuously as "Another form generation library"