Nette Forms: greatly facilitates web forms

Introduction

Nette\Forms greatly facilitates creating and processing web forms. What it can really do?

• validate sent data both client-side (JavaScript) and server-side
• provide high level of security
• multiple render modes
• translations, i18n

Why should you bother setting up framework for a simple web form? You won't have to take care about routine tasks such as writing two validation scripts (client and server) and your code will be safe against security breaches.

Nette Framework puts a great effort to be safe and since forms are the most common user input, Nette forms are as good as impenetrable. All is maintained dynamically and transparently, nothing has to be set manually. Well known vulnerabilities such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) are filtered, as well as special control characters. All inputs are checked for UTF-8 validity. Every multiple-choice, select box and similar are checked for forged values upon validating. Sounds good? Let's try it out.

Documentation can be found on the website.

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Do you like Nette Forms? Are you looking forward to the new features?

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Installation

The recommended way to install is via Composer:

composer require nette/forms

It requires PHP version 8.0.

Client-side support can be installed with npm or yarn:

npm install nette-forms

Usage

Let's create a simple registration form:

use Nette\Forms\Form;

$form = new Form;

$form->addText('name', 'Name:');
$form->addPassword('password', 'Password:');
$form->addSubmit('send', 'Register');

echo $form; // renders the form

Though we mentioned validation, yet our form has none. Let's fix it. We require users to tell us their name, so we should call a setRequired() method, which optional argument is an error message to show, if user does not fill his name in:

$form->addText('name', 'Name:')
	->setRequired('Please fill your name.');

Try submitting a form without the name - you will keep seeing this message until you meet the validation rules. All that is left for us is setting up JavaScript rules. Luckily it's a piece of cake. We only have to link netteForms.js, which is located at /client-side/forms in the distribution package.

<script src="netteForms.js"></script>

Nette Framework adds required class to all mandatory elements. Adding the following style will turn label of name input to red.

<style>
.required label { color: maroon }
</style>

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