Integrate Material-UI and React Final Form

Welcome! Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at this project. Let me briefly explain what it does.

In order to integrate React Final Form with a UI component library such as Material UI, you'll need to create a thin wrapper that passes properties between MUI and RFF components. After searching around for who else has done this, you've stumbled across this project.

Sadly, figuring out the nuances of passing properties across multiple components is non-trivial. It takes a lot of trial and error and hopefully you're writting tests along the way too (hahaha yea, right). Since you are probably in a rush and just want to get onto building features, this repo provides a set of modern and unit tested React components that make it easy to drop into your own Javascript or Typescript project as a small NPM dependency.

Please try things out and review the code first. Take a look at the demo, demo source, codesandbox, and the tests.

One thing to note in the demo is the ability to control the react form rendering. This is what really motivated me to go with RFF. With a small configuration tweak to RFF, it is easy to cut the number of renders down to the bare minimum. This improves performance significantly, especially with larger forms.

If there is some customization that you require, I welcome issues to discuss things or even pr's! If you enjoy this project, please star it and send it to your friends and coworkers. This project will save everyone a lot of time, so I'd love to get the word out.

Usage

Beyond the normal react dependencies, you'll need:

yarn add mui-rff @material-ui/core @material-ui/[email protected] @material-ui/lab final-form react-final-form

If you use the date/time pickers, you'll need:

yarn add @date-io/[email protected] @date-io/[email protected] date-fns

It is unfortunate that so many dependencies need to be installed right now. Pretty sure fixing this will require a lot of work to split everything into separate packages, which seems quite overkill for this project. If anyone would like to volunteer to find and implement a better build system, I'd love the help.

I recommend using Yup for the form validation:

yarn add yup @types/yup

Getting started

MUI-RFF follows the recommended practices for both MUI and RFF. Build your <Form/> and then insert MUI-RFF components. The hello world example looks like this:

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import { Form } from 'react-final-form';
import { TextField } from 'mui-rff';

interface FormData {
  hello: string;
}

interface MyFormProps {
  initialValues: FormData;
}

function App() {
  return <MyForm initialValues={{ hello: 'hello world' }} />;
}

function MyForm(props: MyFormProps) {
  const { initialValues } = props;

  // yes, this can even be async!
  async function onSubmit(values: FormData) {
    console.log(values);
  }

  // yes, this can even be async!
  async function validate(values: FormData) {
    if (!values.hello) {
      return { hello: 'Saying hello is nice.' };
    }
    return;
  }

  return (
    <Form
      onSubmit={onSubmit}
      initialValues={initialValues}
      validate={validate}
      render={({ handleSubmit, values }) => (
        <form onSubmit={handleSubmit} noValidate>
          <TextField label="Hello world" name="hello" required={true} />
          <pre>{JSON.stringify(values)}</pre>
        </form>
      )}
    />
  );
}

ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.querySelector('#root'));

You'll notice that rendering the component and error handling is all done for you without any additional code. Personally, I find this to be the holy grail of building forms because all of the magic is wrapped up into a nice clean interface so that all you care about is providing data and submitting it.

Using MUI-RFF to generate a bunch of form fields is as easy as declaring all the fields and rendering them...

const formFields: any[] = [
  <TextField name="name" label="Invoice name" />,
  <KeyboardDatePicker name="date" label="Invoice date" dateFunsUtils={DateFnsUtils} />,
  <TextField name="purchaseOrder" label="Purchase order" />,
  <TextField name="supplier" label="Supplier" />,
  <TextField name="purchasePrice" label="Purchase price" />,
  <TextField name="depreciationType" label="Depreciation type" />,
  <KeyboardDatePicker name="depreciationStart" label="Depreciation start" dateFunsUtils={DateFnsUtils} />,
  <TextField name="depreciationRate" label="Depreciation rate" />,
];

<Grid container direction="column" alignContent="stretch">
  {formFields.map((item, idx) => (
    <Grid item className={classes.maxWidth} key={idx}>
      {item}
    </Grid>
  ))}
</Grid>

See below for more examples and details about how to use this library... if there is something missing or confusing, please ask in the issue tracker.

Upgrade from 1.x to 2.0

Version 2.0 removes the default margin around components as well as the default time/date formats. This means that MUI-RFF does not override any MUI defaults and you now have to set them on your own. The reason for this change was to allow for better integration with the MUI Theme system. It was a mistake for me to have originally done this, my apologies.

There is now a number of tests which case for this and the demo has been updated.

To get the equivalent margin behavior back, you'll need to add properties to your theme:

const theme = createMuiTheme({
  props: {
    MuiTextField: {
      margin: 'normal',
    },
    MuiFormControl: {
      margin: 'normal',
    },
  },
});

Alternatively, each component has their own way of specifying these settings. Either as margin="normal" or formFieldProps or textFieldProps depending on the component needs.

To get the equivalent date/time formats back, you'll need to specify them as properties:

<DatePicker
  label="Test"
  name="date"
  required={true}
  dateFunsUtils={DateFnsUtils}
  margin="normal"
  variant="inline"
  format="yyyy-MM-dd"
/>

I think based on all these instructions you can see why I tried to pick a default!

Components

All of the components should allow passing MUI configuration properties to them so that they can be easily customized. In the case of RFF and MUI components with deeply nested structures of multiple subcomponents, you can pass the properties in with sepecial top level properties. This is very hard to document fully without making a mess, so please refer to the source code and demos for examples.

<TextField fieldProps={{ validation: myValidationFunction }} />

<Select menuItemProps={{ disableGutters: true }} />

TextField - MUI Docs

import { TextField } from 'mui-rff';

<TextField label="Hello world" name="hello" required={true} />

Checkboxes - MUI Docs

If you have a single checkbox, it is rendered without the label (if no label is defined) and the value is boolean. Otherwise you get an array of values. An example of this is the 'employed' field in the demo.

import {Checkboxes, CheckboxData} from 'mui-rff';

const checkboxData: CheckboxData[] = [
  {label: 'Item 1', value: 'item1'}
  {label: 'Item 2', value: 'item2'}
];

<Checkboxes
  label="Check at least one..."
  name="best"
  required={true}
  data={checkboxData}
/>

Switches - MUI Docs

If you have a single switch, it is rendered without the label (if no label is defined) and the value is boolean. Otherwise you get an array of values. An example of this is the 'available' field in the demo.

import {Switches, SwitchData} from 'mui-rff';

// submits a boolean
<Switches
    label="Enable feature X"
    name="feature-x"
    required={true}
    data={{label: 'Feature X', value: true}}
/>

// submits an array of values of the toggled switches
const switchData: SwitchData[] = [
    {label: 'Item 1', value: 'item1'}
    {label: 'Item 2', value: 'item2'}
];
<Switches
    label="Check at least one..."
    name="best"
    required={true}
    data={switchData}
/>

Radios - MUI Docs

This example shows that you can inline the configuration data instead of passing it in like in the Checkboxes example above.

import {Radios} from 'mui-rff';

<Radios
  label="Pick one..."
  name="gender"
  required={true}
  data={[
    {label: 'Item 1', value: 'item1'}
    {label: 'Item 2', value: 'item2'}
  ]}
/>

Select - MUI Docs

Select allows you to inline the MUI <MenuItem> component. You can also pass in a data= property similar to Checkboxes and Radios and the items will be generated for you. This example shows overriding the MUI default formControl properties.

import { Select } from 'mui-rff';
import { MenuItem } from '@material-ui/core';

<Select name="city" label="Select a City" formControlProps={{ margin: 'normal' }}>
  <MenuItem value="London">London</MenuItem>
  <MenuItem value="Paris">Paris</MenuItem>
  <MenuItem value="Budapest">A city with a very long Name</MenuItem>
</Select>

KeyboardDatePicker - MUI Docs

Note: You can forgo providing the dateFunsUtils so long as you have a MuiPickersUtilsProvider already present as a parent within the DOM.

You'll need to add dependencies:

yarn add @date-io/[email protected] @date-io/[email protected] date-fns

import { KeyboardDatePicker } from 'mui-rff';

import 'date-fns';
import DateFnsUtils from '@date-io/date-fns';

<KeyboardDatePicker label="Pick a date" name="date" required={true} dateFunsUtils={DateFnsUtils} />

DatePicker - MUI Docs

Note: You can forgo providing the dateFunsUtils so long as you have a MuiPickersUtilsProvider already present as a parent within the DOM.

You'll need to add dependencies:

yarn add @date-io/[email protected] @date-io/[email protected] date-fns

import { KeyboardDatePicker } from 'mui-rff';

import 'date-fns';
import DateFnsUtils from '@date-io/date-fns';

<DatePicker label="Pick a date" name="date" required={true} dateFunsUtils={DateFnsUtils} />

TimePicker - MUI Docs

Note: You can forgo providing the dateFunsUtils so long as you have a MuiPickersUtilsProvider already present as a parent within the DOM.

You'll need to add dependencies:

yarn add @date-io/[email protected] @date-io/[email protected] date-fns

import { KeyboardDatePicker } from 'mui-rff';

import 'date-fns';
import DateFnsUtils from '@date-io/date-fns';

<TimePicker label="Pick a date" name="date" required={true} dateFunsUtils={DateFnsUtils} />

Autocomplete - MUI Docs

Note: Part of the @material-ui/lab dependency.

import React from 'react';
import { Checkbox as MuiCheckbox } from '@material-ui/core';
import { Autocomplete } from 'mui-rff';

const autocompleteData = [
  { label: 'Earth', value: 'earth' },
  { label: 'Mars', value: 'mars' },
  { label: 'Venus', value: 'venus' },
  { label: 'Brown Dwarf Glese 229B', value: '229B' }
];

<Autocomplete
  label="Pick at least one planet"
  name="planet"
  required={true}
  options={autocompleteData}
  getOptionValue={option => option.value}
  getOptionLabel={option => option.label}
  disableCloseOnSelect={true}
  renderOption={(option, { selected }) => (
    <>
      <MuiCheckbox style={{ marginRight: 8 }} checked={selected} />
      {option.label}
    </>
  )}
  multiple
/>

When multiple is true, the initialValues passed into the <Form> element needs to be an array...

const initialValues: any = {
  planet: ['mars'], // <-- Needs to be an array
};

<Form
  initialValues={initialValues}
  render={({ handleSubmit }) => (
    <form onSubmit={handleSubmit}>
      <Autocomplete
        label="Pick at least one planet"
        name="planet"
        multiple
      />      
    </form>
  )}
/>

Helpers

Optional helpers to make dealing with form validation a breeze!

makeValidate(schema)

Form validation is a notorious pain in the arse and there are a couple libraries out there to help simplify things. After experimenting with both Yup and Joi, I've settled on Yup. The main reason is that for form validation, Yup has the ability to validate all of the schema and Joi stops on the first failure. Joi is also originally focused on server side validation, while Yup focuses on running in the browser.

That said, it is still helpful to translate Yup errors into something that Final Form can deal with. Final Form expects validation to return an object where the key is the field name and the value is the error message. This little helper does what we need:

yarn add yup @types/yup

import { Form } from 'react-final-form';
import { makeValidate } from 'mui-rff';
import * as Yup from 'yup';

// We define our schema based on the same keys as our form:
const schema = Yup.object().shape({
  employed: Yup.boolean().required(),
});

// Run the makeValidate function...
const validate = makeValidate(schema);

// Then pass the result into the <Form/>...
<Form validate={validate}>
  <Checkboxes name="employed" required={true} data={{ label: 'Employed', value: true }} />
</Form>

makeRequired(schema)

Expanding on the example above, we can see that the employed checkbox is required in the schema, but we still need to define the <Checkboxes... required={true} property, this is ugly because the two can get out of sync.

We can then use another helper function to parse the schema and return an object where the key is the field name and the value is a boolean.

yarn add yup @types/yup

import { Form } from 'react-final-form';
import { makeValidate } from 'mui-rff';
import * as Yup from 'yup';

// We define our schema based on the same keys as our form:
const schema = Yup.object().shape({
  employed: Yup.boolean().required(),
});

const validate = makeValidate(schema);

// Adding in the additional schema parsing...
const required = makeRequired(schema);

// Then pass it into the <Form/>
<Form validate={validate}>
  <Checkboxes name="employed" required={required.employed} data={{ label: 'Employed', value: true }} />
</Form>

Debug

Prints out the JSON version of the form data.

import { Debug } from 'mui-rff';

<Form>
  <Checkboxes name="employed" data={{ label: 'Employed', value: true }} />
  <Debug />
</Form>

Building

• Clone the project.

• yarn to install dependencies

• yarn build to build the distribution

• yarn publish to upload to npm and deploy the gh-pages

• yarn test to run the test suite

• yarn lint and yarn lint-fix to auto format code

• cd example; yarn; yarn start to run the example on http://localhost:1234

---

Credits

Thanks to the awesome work by these projects:

• React
• Material-UI
• React Final Form
• Jest
• React Testing Library
• TSDX
• Typescript
• Yarn
• And all their dependencies...