Binding Data to Forms

Binding data to UI components in TypeScript forms.

API Basics
How to Bind Form Data

Hilla provides a way for binding input fields to a data model.

The client-side Binder supports Java backend endpoints for loading and saving the form data, and reuses the metadata from Java Bean validation annotations for client-side validation.

API Basics

The form binding API consists of three key concepts:

The field() directive to bind the field components in form views
The generated TypeScript models for POJO classes used in endpoints, which are used as field references and provide the necessary metadata
The useForm React Hook returns a UseFormResult object that is responsible for keeping track of the form state, the default and current values, and validation of the data.

See the Form Binding Reference for more details.

How to Bind Form Data

For example, let us consider a Java endpoint with methods for loading and saving a Person bean:

/**
 * A Hilla endpoint for the person-view.ts form view.
 */
@Endpoint
public class PersonEndpoint {
    /**
     * Loads a Person to edit into the view.
     * @return default form data
     */
    public Person loadPerson() {
        // ...
    }

    /**
     * Saves the edited Person from the view.
     * @param person form data to save
     */
    public void savePerson(Person person) {
        // ...
    }
}

To bind data to a form, follow these steps in your frontend/views/person/PersonView.tsx client-side React view:

Import the useForm hook from the @vaadin/hilla-react-form package. Import your PersonEndpoint data endpoint and the generated PersonModel from the frontend/generated folder:

import { useForm } from '@vaadin/hilla-react-form';

import { PersonEndpoint } from 'Frontend/generated/endpoints';
import PersonModel from 'Frontend/generated/com/example/application/PersonModel';

Acquire a UseFormResult instance for your view by calling the useForm:
```
export default function PersonView() {
  // ...

  const { model, field } = useForm(PersonModel);

  // ...
}
```
The PersonModel here is generated alongside a Person TypeScript data interface from the Person.java bean. This describes the structure of the data and the validation-related metadata for the form binding.

Bind the UI components in the template using the {…field()} syntax:

export default function PersonView() {
  // ...

  const { model, field } = useForm(PersonModel);

  return (
    <TextField label="Full name" {...field(model.fullName)}></TextField>
  );

}

In this example, model is an instance of PersonModel.

Note	Models don’t contain any actual data. To access the actual current or default value of the form, you can acquire their respective reference by destructing the `UseFormResult` instance as `const { value, defaultValue, … } = useForm(…)` when calling the `useForm` hook.

Documentation

Documentation

Binding Data to Forms

API Basics

How to Bind Form Data