Angular Schema Form

Generate forms from JSON schemas using AngularJS!

Recent developments

First, as there has been a rather intensive period of planning and change for this project, there have been important new developments for the project. Lets get into those first(the normal front page continues below):

The json-schema-form standard

A standard, json-schema-form, is being created.

The concept of combining data, JSON Schema and a form definition, is something that isn't just usable in a JavaScript Angular web application, but in any framework, on any platform. Current ports are angular-schema-form and react-schema-form, but delphi-schema-form and laravel-schema-form are planned as well. To make these ports easier to do, and for everything to work in harmony, a common ground has to be established, a standard.

Organisational

1. ASF has changed into using a more open governance model. This basically means that ASF is now governed by more people.
2. An umbrella organisaton, json-schema-form, has been formed. As you can see, this repo is now a part of that Github organisation, not Textalk.

Projects

After a phase of planning, the following list of projects has been decided upon: https://github.com/json-schema-form/json-schema-form/wiki/Current-projects

Release 1.0

The next major release of ASF will be 1.0.

The goal for that version is to include the breaking changes that is needed for future developments, like *Of and local $refs:

• Break out the non-framework specific parts of ASF into a vanilla ES6 module
• Remove the built-in bootstrap decorator, and in doing that require that users wanting to use that load that separately. The reason obviously being the material decorator.

The reason for the core break out is for all javascript-based ports of the json-schema-form concept to be able to share the same central code base. Work in that direction is being done in the json-schema-form-core repository.

Schema builder UI

There is now a UI for building schemas and forms being developed at json-schema-builder repository.

Ralphael Owino (main author), has a demo up already.

Schema and form repository

This is now a repository with template schemas and forms. So far all the schema.org types has been converted to JSON schema approximations, and also some has been further resolved and had (huge) forms generated. Schema.org is big.

Documentation

The documentation is evolving, and it is happening mostly on the wiki:

• The ASF wiki
• The wiki of the json-schema-form organisation

New Gitter rooms

These are just started.

• Discussions on the general json-schema-form projects being carried out
• Discussions on the angular-specific ASF projects

The Blog / The Web Site / The Twitter / The Movie

medium.com/@SchemaFormIO / schemaform.io / @SchemaFormIO / Movie

If you use ASF in your project/company please let us know! We'd love to feature you on the site.

Demo Time!

Try out the example page. Try editing the schema or form definition and see what comes out!

Hint: By pressing the 'Save to gist' button (top left), you can save your example into a shareable link.

What is it?

Schema Form is a set of AngularJS directives (and a couple of services). It can do two things to make life easier:

1. Create a form directly from a JSON schema.
2. Validate form fields against that same JSON schema.

Schema Form uses convention over configuration, so it comes packaged with some sensible defaults. But you can always customize it by changing the order and types of form fields.

JSON Form

Schema Form is inspired by the nice JSON Form library and aims to be roughly compatible with it, especially its form definition. So what sets Schema Form apart from JSON Form?

1. Schema Form integrates deeply with AngularJS and uses AngularJS conventions to handle forms.
2. Schema Form uses tv4 for validation, making it compatible with version 4 of the JSON schema standard.
3. By default, Schema Form generates Bootstrap 3-friendly HTML.

Documentation

You can find all documentation here, it covers all the different field types and their options.

It also covers how to extend angular schema form with your own field types.

Basic Usage

First, expose your schema, form, and model to the $scope.

angular.module('myModule', ['schemaForm'])
       .controller('FormController', function($scope) {
  $scope.schema = {
    type: "object",
    properties: {
      name: { type: "string", minLength: 2, title: "Name", description: "Name or alias" },
      title: {
        type: "string",
        enum: ['dr','jr','sir','mrs','mr','NaN','dj']
      }
    }
  };
 
  $scope.form = [
    "*",
    {
      type: "submit",
      title: "Save"
    }
  ];
 
  $scope.model = {};
});

Then load them into Schema Form using the sfSchema, sfForm, and sfModel directives.

<div ng-controller="FormController">
    <form sf-schema="schema" sf-form="form" sf-model="model"></form>
</div>

Installation

Bower

It's simplest to install Schema Form using Bower.

bower install angular-schema-form

This will install the latest release and basic dependencies. See dependecies section below.

You can also load the files via cdnjs.com.

Manual

You can also just download the contents of the dist/ folder and add dependencies manually.

Dependencies

Schema form has a lot of dependencies, most of which are optional. Schema Form depends on:

1. AngularJS version 1.3.x is recomended. Version 1.2.x has some limitation. See known limitations.
2. angular-sanitize
3. tv4
4. objectpath
5. bootstrap 3

If you install via bower you get all of the above except bootstrap since we don't want to push a certain version or flavor on you. Also make sure you got the angular version you actually want.

Additional dependecies

1. If you'd like to use drag-and-drop reordering of arrays, you'll also need ui-sortable and its jQueryUI dependencies. See the ui-sortable documentation for details about which parts of jQueryUI are needed. You can safely ignore these if you don't need reordering.
2. Schema Form provides tabbed arrays through the form type tabarray. Tab arrays default to tabs on the left side. For these to work, you'll need to include the CSS from bootstrap-vertical-tabs. However, you won't need Bootstrap Vertical Tabs for horizontal tabs (the tabType: "top" option).

The minified files include templates - no need to load additional HTML files.

Script Loading

Schema form is split into two main files, dist/schema-form.min.js and dist/boostrap-decorator.min.js and they need be loaded in that order. AngularJS, tv4 and objectpath also needs to be loaded before Schema Form.

<script type="text/javascript" src="bower_components/angular/angular.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="bower_components/angular-sanitize/angular-sanitize.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="bower_components/tv4/tv4.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="bower_components/objectpath/lib/ObjectPath.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="bower_components/angular-schema-form/dist/schema-form.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="bower_components/angular-schema-form/dist/bootstrap-decorator.min.js"></script>

Module loading

Don't forget to load the schemaForm module or nothing will happen.

angular.module('myModule', ['schemaForm']);

Add-ons

There are several add-ons available, for a full list see the web page. Your can also create your own add-ons!

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see Contributing.md for more info.

Building

The files in the dist/ folder, plus dependencies, are all you need to use Schema Form. But if you'd like to build it yourself, we use gulp.

First off, you need to have nodejs installed. Then install all dev dependencies of the project with npm, install gulp and run the default task.

$ npm install
$ sudo npm install -g gulp
$ bower install
$ gulp

The default task uses gulp-angular-templatecache to compile all html templates to js and then concatenates and minifies them with the rest of the sources.

You can also run gulp watch to have it rebuild on change.

Tests

Unit tests are run with karma and written using mocha, chai and sinon

To run the tests:

1. Install all dependencies via NPM.
2. Install dev dependencies with bower.
3. Install the Karma CLI.
4. Run the tests.

$ npm install
$ bower install
$ sudo npm install -g karma-cli
$ karma start karma.conf.js