Supler update: 0.3.0 release

It’s been some time since the last release of Supler. Just as a short reminder: Supler is a Rapid Form Development library, allowing you to use your favorite Javascript frontend, and Scala backend frameworks. It keeps the form definition centralized, taking care of client/server-side validation, form rendering, applying new values and serializing/deserializing. Star Supler on GitHub if you think that might be interesting!

If you’re new to Supler, or if you’d like to get started with form development using Supler, take a look at our docs or the live demo.

The 0.3.0 release brings a lot of smaller and bigger improvements as well as bug fixes (a mandatory position in each release of any software ;) ). It is now possible to customise a number of field options on the frontend, starting with specifying the field order, to more specific per-field options like render hints or overriding rendering functions using javascript (it is still possible of course to override rendering using HTML templates). A short example of how field options may look like:

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new Supler.Form(container, {
field_options: {
  'secretField': {
    render_hint: 'password' 
  },
  'friends[].bio': {
    render_options: {
      renderLabel: function(forId, label) { return '<div>some html</div>'; } 
    }
    read_value: function(element) { return ... } 
  },
  'render_hint:radio': {
    // options common for all fields rendered as radios
  }
});

Before the only way to layout fields was one field per row. Now it is also possible to have multiple fields in one row; just combine the fields using the || operator:

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form[Person](f => List(
  // row 1
  f.field(_.age).label("Age") || f.field(_.birthday).label("Birthday"),
  // row 2
  f.field(_.address1).label("Address 1") || f.field(_.address2).label("Address 2")
)

The row decorations and how rows are rendered is of course fully customisable via overriding the javascript rendering functions. We are also looking into making this more flexible, with frontend-defined form layout templates.

Other changes include:

• more validators for basic types
• improved option validators
• improved single/multi-select fields support
• easier definitions of custom transformers (for serializing/deserializing custom classes to/from json).
• support for fields which serialised to complex JSON objects (not plain strings/numbers etc.)

We also have a new Bintray/Artifactory/Travis-based build system, which fully automates the releases so snapshots are always up-to-date!

As always, if you like the project, please start it on Github or let us know your opinion either here, on the forum or on the Gitter chat!