HAL-Forms feature requests

[evert]

As promised, here's a list of things that I think would be very great to have in HAL-Forms.

If it's more helpful to have these all as separate issues, I'm happy to split these up.

• a 'target' field in each form. For us, the use of the _htarget= query parameter doesn't make that much sense. URIs are largely treated as opaque, and forms are server-rendered based on other contextual information.
• Support for a type property in each field, maybe just referencing the HTML5 specification for it's possible values. Also mentioned in different field types #6. It might be helpful to mention what each 'type' serializes to. For example, a checkbox will probably generate a JSON boolean.
• Support for placeholder, min, max, step, minLength, maxLength
• Support for an enum or options property. options could be used as follows:

{
  "name": "color",
  "options": {
    "#F00": "red",
    "#0F0": "green",
    "#00F": "blue"
  }
}

• Support for multiple forms in a single document (don't limit to default). Also mentioned here Open spec up to other templates - don't confine to "default" #24

I believe all of these could be introduced without breaking backwards compatibility.

If it's helpful, the type Ketting uses to generically describe a field in a hypermedia document is here:

https://github.com/badgateway/ketting/blob/master/src/field.ts

This is how we map a HAL Forms field to Ketting field:

https://github.com/badgateway/ketting/blob/master/src/state/hal.ts#L266

[mamund]

@evert

thanks for submitting these -- all good additions.

i'll review the ketting links you provided to help influence the mods.

as you mentioned, i'm going to break this up into individual issues since some will be super easy and others will take a bit of work. the enum one might be compatible with another idea i have been using for another format (called suggest). we can discuss in that issue thread.

thanks again and looking forward to getting these into place.

[evert]

Awesome! Very exited =)

[mamund]

adding support for checkbox, radio, and select-options via suggest constuct from #6

note that this might also be a way to deal with enums (see #38)