Cave

A simple Ruby form library, intended for use with Rails

Largely inspired by Code Climate's 7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models as a method for encapsulating validation into an object with a single responsibility.

Forms

Cave::Form is a light glue layer around Rails' ActiveModel::Validations and Virtus' type coercion. You may want to consult their documentation for more options.

First define a Form subclass like so

    class FormClass < Cave::Form
      field :name, String,
        presence: true,
        format: { with: /\A[a-zA-Z]+\z/, message: "Only letters allowed" }
        # Takes any number of standard Rails validation helper options
      field :favorite_number, Integer,
        inclusion: { in: 1..10 }

      def persist!
        # Define your persistence logic here.
        # This method will be called whenever a valid form is saved.
        "Form saved!"
      end
    end

The resulting class may be used as follows

    form = FormClass.bind name: 'James Dabbs', favorite_number: 11
    form.valid?
    => false
    form.errors.full_messages
    => ["Name Only letters allowed", "Favorite number is not included in the list"]

    form = FormClass.bind name: 'jamesdabbs', favorite_number: '7'
    form.valid?
    => true
    form.favorite_number
    => 7  # Note the type coercion
    form.save!
    => "Form saved!"

###Forms for Models

For the common use case of creating or updating a model with a form, Cave provides the Cave::ModelForm class.

    class ProfileForm < Cave::ModelForm
      model Profile

      field :name, String, presence: true
      field :age,  Integer
    end

    ProfileForm.bind(name: 'James').save!  # Creates a new Profile named 'James'

    instance = Profile.first
    ProfileForm.bind(instance, name: 'Jim').save!  # Updates the Profile's name

###Planned features

Accept :default and :initial field options
Add presenters for rendering forms into html (inc. a bootstrap template)
Improve handling of intial values (as for unbound ModelForms)
Write docs
Requests?

cave

Runtime

Cave

Forms