Exploring OSS - ChameleonForms

I had the chance to check out ChameleonForms for ASP.NET MVC form creation and it’s a nice library. You can get it from the NuGet package.

ChameleonForms allows you to fluently build and configure forms.

@using (var f = Html.BeginChameleonForm()) {
    using (var s = f.BeginSection("A form")) {
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.RequiredString).Label("Some string")
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.SomeEnum)
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.Phone).Placeholder("+1 (XXX) XXX-XXXX")
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.SomeCheckbox).InlineLabel("Are you sure?")
    }
    using (var n = f.BeginNavigation()) {
        @n.Submit("Submit")
    }
}

So that’s not super complicated. Just apply some methods in a chain to the field and have at it. There is an example app that is maintained that includes pretty extensive and complicated forms to use as a base to get started.

Interestingly enough, most of the configuration revolves around a pretty simple idea when you dig into the code. FieldConfiguration keeps an Attributes collection which contains most of the configuration you can apply to the form field. Want to set Rows on a textarea, the IFieldConfiguration.Rows(int) method just adds it the internal attributes collection.

public IFieldConfiguration Rows(int numRows)
{
    Attr("rows", numRows);
    return this;
}

That's pretty simple. Then there's a `FieldGenerator` that collects all this configuration and

passes it off to built in MVC generators in the proper format.

So I’d suggest checking it out if you ever want a new way to generate your forms in ASP.NET MVC.