Capturing Form component attributes into a data structure

Anvil Q&A
8

I don’t fully understand the big picture of what you are trying to do, but whether you create the form in the IDE or dynamically from code, serializing/deserialising it could give you half working objects, maybe with the correct html, but I’m afraid Anvil will not be able to work with it. Events, databinding and other magics may not not work (I haven’t tried, just a feeling).

If the forms are designed with the IDE, then all you need to do is pick the right form and play with databinding. You will store something like {'form': 'FormAbc', 'value1': 123, 'value2': 'xyz'}.

If the forms are generated dynamically, then you can add details about what components are to be placed in the form.
Something like:

[
    {'type': 'checkbox', 'text': 'Click me!', 'checked': True},
    {'type': 'radiobutton', 'text': 'No, click me!', 'selected': True},
]

Then you can add the required components at run time. This way Anvil creates the components first, then renders them to html. After creating each component you can also add event listeners and do whatever you like.

You can see an example of dynamic creation of components based on a list of dictionaries on the InputBox: Input_box() and alert2()

EDIT
Maybe you can use the input_box itself to show different input forms. I am using it in all my apps now :slight_smile: (obviously only if (1) it covers your use cases and (2) it looks good enough for your app)

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