Show HN: ShapeForm – Schema Driven Forms for React

Andrew from TakeShape here! The primary author of this library. We tired a number of different form libraries before settling on writing our own. You can check out a full talk I gave on ShapeForm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iplY8Le1zK0) or you can just read my slides (https://shape-form-talk.netlify.com/) from the talk.

ShapeForm has several nice features that make it perfect for our use case, and may yours:

JSON Schema validation - Easily share the same form validation frontend and backend

️ Fast - Pure components for fast rendering even with large forms

Redux / Standalone state management - Choose your own adventure

Custom widgets - Widgets are simply React components

Form reducers - Useful for async validation, data normalization, the sky's the limit.

If you find ShapeForm useful or want to make it more useful I'd love for you to contribute to the project!

How does shapeform compare to https://github.com/mozilla-services/react-jsonschema-form

It's great to see more libraries that deal with rendering JSONSchema. I've been working on a drag and drop formbuilder / grid [0] for creating crud apps that leverages react-jsonschema-form.[1]

I noticed that while I create custom rails apps for clients, they often want to create additional forms and still leverage the authentication, permissions, and existing data in the app. This rules out most 3rd party form builders like typeform, jotform etc. which are mostly for surveys anyway. Sometimes the dev time to create them(UI, DB migrations, testing, validations) is too costly for an idea they just want to test.

So, I use the builder to create a JSON Schema, then embed the form into the rails app. What's cool is that I can utilize permissions from the core app to disable certain fields, and I can pass in enum values so drop downs have up-to-date options pulled right from the DB.

We use react-jsonschema-form, but the jsonschema we produce could be used in any of the tools mentioned in this thread.

I'm close to opening this up to other devs soon, and would love your feedback. There's a signup form on the website if you're interested.

[0] https://responsevault.com/ [1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/react-jsonschema-form

Wow this looks awesome! I've been using Alpaca.js [1] at FormAPI [2], which is also a JSON Schema form builder. This looks much better, and much easier to customize, since I already use React / Redux / React DnD for other parts of the application. I was also looking at react-jsonschema-form, but agree with all the downsides they mentioned in the talk (hard to customize, requires Bootstrap, hard to use with Redux, etc.)

So I think I will definitely switch to ShapeForm in the future, and I was actually planning to build something like this myself. I'm definitely looking forward to the TypeScript support.

[1] http://www.alpacajs.org

[2] http://formapi.io

I like it. I moved away from react (and all other frameworks) but I wish I had this 4 years ago when I was exclusively building react apps.

This is pretty darned cool. Really strong example of how to walk through a set of slides exploring why to build a new form library, too.

Looks nice! Our forms have a lot of logic where certain answers hide/show other fields/sections. Does this have the ability to swap the schema/form fields on the fly?

Also check out uniforms [0] which integrates nicely with other Schema libraries

[0] https://github.com/vazco/uniforms

Sorry to say, but it looks deprecated already. ES6, pure components, redux(without hooks), etc.. It's sad, but JS community is just moving too fast. We build things for today, not tomorrow..

Disclosure: I work on Tree Notation.

Down the line (maybe in 2020) you might want to consider looking at using Tree Notation instead of JSONSchema. Could simplify things quite a bit.

Here's what that might look like, using your example on your Readme:

http://treenotation.org/designer/#grammar%0A%20shapeFormNode...