govuk-form-builder VS Simple Form

I build and maintain some libraries that are used by teams working on GOV.UK projects in Rails. Have been inundated with offers since their release, and they've gone on to be used in some fairly high profile things.

https://github.com/x-govuk/govuk-form-builder

This is my side project, I'm a dev currently contracting at DfE. This library and the form builder[0] make working with the design system easier for Rails devs.

[0] https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/

If you dig around on GitHub you'll see most government departments have an organisation where they publish stuff. For example, here's the MoJ, DfE, Cabinet Office.

This is definitely the best approach in my opinion, providing the people writing the docs are capable of contributing directly.

One of my projects[0] builds and deploys a static documentation site[1] on every push to master. The static site generator (Nanoc, in this case) then pulls in the library and uses it to publish its own documentation. All the examples are snippets of code[2] that are both displayed as-is and eval'd into the final output.

The guide can never be out of sync with the library.

[0] https://github.com/dfe-digital/govuk_design_system_formbuild...

[1] https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/

[2] https://github.com/DFE-Digital/govuk_design_system_formbuild...

I also tend to use gems like simple_form to generate my form HTML, and this saves me from having to maintain a lot of view code to outputting translated content onto forms. Also simple_form has it's own i18n convention that compliments the Rails default pretty well.

I followed the RailsCasts tutorial and its GitHub page to set up the gem in my application and used it for all of the models in my application. It was working perfectly fine showing the default error message at the top and the validation message at the bottom of their respective fields.

Okay now for those "buttons". We don't want just a normal button or link though. This is where we need the booking update form. Let's use simple_form_for (check out the docs here).

There are many ways to create a form in Rails, whether you want to create a form with Form builder from Rails itself or maybe using third party gem like simple_form. Of course, simple_form is not the only option we have to build form in rails, there are alternatives out there such as formtastic, cocoon, nested_form, etc. However, in this post I'm going to give you a basic use case to use simple_form in Rails application.

I usually go with simple_form, I customise my forms by configuring it and letting it handle the repeated rendering.

Simple Form gem

The biggest unclear area that we saw related to view components were forms. There were glimpses of compatibility issues with Rails form helpers in the documentation and we saw a recent effort of the team to mitigate them. Moreover, we were used to building forms with Simple Form which added another variable to the equation. And, in general, we considered the Rails form builders (as well as the Simple Form builder) a system of form-related components in the first place so we were unsure how this would fit into the View Components ecosystem or whether we should even try to do that.

Learn more about simple form: 1) https://github.com/heartcombo/simple_form 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfZk74R2Oi4&t=5s