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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

1. One of the most painful thing with SSR forms is passing the data back-and-forth between the server and client when there are validation errors. Sometimes the data is very sensitive and you have to return the form with some values (like SSN) empty and make the user retype that along with with whatever field(s) were the actual issue. I'm also curious about how file uploads would work.

2. REST/GraphQL/gRPC API. Often, if you want to open up your API to internal or external users it's a lot easier if the frontend was already written to deal with protobuf or JSON endpoints. Seems like it would be painful to add an API to an htmlx backend.

Is there a good way to address these with htmlx?

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Why can’t you hydrate the form with the SSN? If you’re serving it via TLS, there shouldn’t be any problem. It’s no different sending it up to the client than it is for the client to send it down to you. Unless you’re logging every rendered page for some reason, I guess.

It was just an example, replace SSN with password if you'd prefer.

Regarding #1, I've found that Phoenix + LiveView has been helpful for these cases. They have great form validation tools using Changesets and the `phx-change` attribute [1]. You can redact certain fields [2], and even treat certain fields like virtual fields (like password not being stored vs the password hash being stored) [3].

Of course, the (potential) drawback is in using Elixir for both front-end and back-end which may be a tough sell to a client or employer.

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[1]: https://blog.appsignal.com/2021/09/28/real-time-form-validat...

[2]: https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.Schema.html#module-redacting-fi...

[3]: https://elixircasts.io/ecto-virtual-attributes

1. I think you can just throw an error, and instead of swapping your filled-in form, you make a validation error appear below the form, e.g.

2. So far in my experience a rest API for my own front end has been pretty specific, so I'd want to add a separate API anyway for that purpose.

With something like Django you can make a quick and dirty json API by just returning the context dictionary that you were passing into the template renderer.

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