@open-formulieren/formio-builder

Formio builder for Open Forms

This library implements the builder to build Form.io 4.13.x forms supporting the Open Forms extensions.

:construction: This library is currently under heavy development :construction:

The Storybook documentation is available online.

The shared types library documentation is available online.

What is the purpose of this library?

It aims to improve the developer experience for the Open Formulieren development team, both by making the builder form definition more declarative/direct and obvious, and by using techniques absolving the need to reason about when to re-render state in the DOM.

Open Forms adds a number of extensions directly in the builder, parts of which are derived from earlier inputs and require synchronization of certain state. Historically, this has proven to cause a large number of bugs, annoyances and extremely complex code where we were essentially fighting Form.io itself.

This library is NOT intended to be a competing library of Form.io's own form builder:

• it does not implement all the Form.io features, only the ones actively used and exposed in Open Forms
• it does not implement the Javascript API of Form.io's form builder, instead it provides the hooks needed by the Open Forms backend project

Contributing

Contributions that do not provide a direct benefit to the Open Forms project will unfortunately be rejected, as we do not have the ambition nor resources to maintain these.

For (code) contributions that do fit the goals of this library, please follow these guidelines:

• Create an issue with a description of the problem or required feature
• Reference the issue ID in commit messages and pull requests
• Functionality should be documented in Storybook
• Functionality should have interaction tests in Storybook to describe and protect the expected behaviour

Getting started

1. Clone the repository and then ensure you use the correct node version:

nvm use

1. Start Storybook in dev mode for component development:

npm run compilemessages
npm start

1. Make code changes, check in Storybook, add tests... etc.

2. Run the tests (Storybook needs to be running still!)

npm test

1. Check that the (Typescript) build compiles cleanly:

npm run build:esm

Managing translations

Any user-facing literals should be defined as being translatable in the code.

To extract these messages, there are utility scripts, intended to be run from the root of the repository.

• ./bin/makemessages.sh - responsible for extracting translations from the code
• ./bin/find_untranslated_messages.py - useful to check if you missed any translations

Translations are shipped as assets in the NPM package, in the i18n folder. Downstream projects can include them from there.

Compilation

You can compile the messages using:

npm run compilemessages

This is required for Storybook, as the message catalog is loaded dynamically depending on the active locale.

Roadmap

Builder form

The builder form is the form + preview shown in the edit component modal.

• Set up global structure on how to define the builder form for a particular Form.io component type
• Implement generic, bootstrap-based Form.io components to compose forms
• Orchestrate form state with Formik + zod for validation
• Wire up react-intl for localization
• Define and publish Open Forms-specific component type schema's (shared library)
• Figure out how to do react-intl message catalog extraction/management for supported languages
• Implement the builder forms for the supported component types
• Use smarter (rich text) editor make using form variables more user friendly

Builder

• Sidebar/component type picker, grouped into categories
• Dropzone to drop a picked component
• Dropzone for container components to support child/nested components

Notes to address at some point

• Formio used tooltip.js, which used to be popper.js (?), which points to tippy.js. That seems to point to Floating UI, however there is a https://github.com/atomiks/tippyjs-react.

• Figure out component-specific documentation/instructions