‘Iacta alea est’

Form Formation: Bootstrap Form

Upon reading some of my posts about form formation in Ruby a colleague pointed out the Bootstrap Form Ruby gem.

This gem is firmly in the camp of HTML generation. It is follows the conventional Rails approach of defining a custom form builder, inheriting from the in-built default. I examined the writing of a custom form builder in Rails ViewComponents after an initial look in Rails Form Builder.

What Bootstrap Form does is provide out-of-the-box Bootstrap markup for forms. By using the method bootstrap_form_for instead of the default form_for and simply using a one-line statement per field it produces the fully fledged Bootstrap markup including label, form control and error messages.

<%= bootstrap_form_for(@user) do |f| %>
  <%= f.email_field :email %>
  <%= f.password_field :password %>
  <%= f.check_box :remember_me %>
  <%= f.submit "Log In" %>
<% end %>

This looks remarkably like the dynamic Phoenix forms. It is concise, and it is a clear mapping between attribute and form control. It is technically imperative, but carries a declarative feel. The form builder takes all of the responsibilities for generating the field, almost acting like the widget in the more declarative approaches of Django and Bureaucrat. The main distinction is that here the mapping is happening in the template itself.

This opens up another axis of enquiry. Given HTML forms can be so complex (see persisting drafts) and that many of the conventions live in some particular configuration of the HTML, there is a great benefit in unifying this and componentizing it. In this case the componentization of Bootstrap markup is happening in the custom form builder, nicely abstracted away from view.

—Monday 24 May 2021.