Form input types

Basically we can map the attributes of an entity to a set of possible input widgets. For example an integer (or any kind of numeric values) can be displayed as text input filed, sliders, input filed with arrows on the right end to modify the value. Or in the case of a boolean attribute possible widgets would be a select box with true and false as values, a check box or two radio buttons etc.

We have to come up with at least one widget per attribute type. I decided to organize the data types as a tree. The first level of the tree consists of database data types. Now we can introduce all possible widgets as children of the nodes from the first level. A first level data type might be "text" but we can define subnodes of "text" like "multilineText" or "email" in order to be more specific.

All data types may be fetched via API

POST /data/constant/data_type/query

Below you can find the actual list of the type hierarchy:

parent_name	name
NULL	root
root	numeric
numeric	percentage
root	integer
root	numeric[]
root	double precision[]
root	interval
root	bytea
root	jsonb
root	bool
root	date
root	time
root	timestamp
root	timestamptz
root	integer[]
root	oid
root	matrix
root	vector
root	scalar
root	bigint
root	bigint[]
root	json
root	text
text	fspath
text	email
text	html
text	color
text	password
text	multiline
text	url
bool	boolean
file	video
jsonb	file
file	picture

Now a form can be defined as a set of widgets to display the all attributes of the entity. The universe contains the definition of each entity and all it's attributes. Let's keep to the example product_category of the entity product.

{
	"id": 963,
	"name": "product_category",
	"label": "Product category",
	"description": "The category of the product.",
	"dataType": "bigint",
	"required": true,
	"displayOrder": 0,
	"isSystemAttribute": false,
	"isReference": true,
	"referenceDetails": {
		"targetModule": "store",
		"targetEntity": "product_category",
		"targetAttribute": "id",
		"resolveUrl": "/store/product_category/{{product_category}}",
		"resolveVerb": "GET"
	}
}

Now we are able to render the input filed with the label "Product category" using a default bigint widget (which might be a simple input text field with a validator). Additionally we now that the field is "required", so we can check this in advance before submitting it to the backend. And actually we know that this field is a reference to the entity product category.