Form Builder

Seam is great framework, and all of us love developing with it. We normally start with seam-gen and am continuing with manual development.

It is great for generation of a starter application, but its customization abilities are limited. If we try to customize code generated by seam-gen, we can no longer regenerate. Another problem that we have with seam-gen is that it generates forms with basic input components and does not offer any customization. For example, for properties of an enumerate type, seam-gen's form field is an input text field; however, what we want is a drop-down list of the enumerated type values.

To address these problems, I have developed a tool called FormBuilder that can fully generate view forms from entity beans and offers complete customization of input fields. My tool uses Hibernate-Validation (annotations). Developers can even define their own input components for form generation. When the input components are wrapped as facelet tag, it can offer even more!

Some features:

1. The tool is completely configurable using annotations and XML.
2. Each generated form can function in either read-only or editable model, depending on the editable attribute.
3. The form uses configuration-by-exception for its field rendering for security
4. Forms may be referenced by Facelets tags to decrease application coupling.
5. Tool forces good practice for code management (different users same style)
6. Entity field property propagation to the form allows client-side validation
7. I provide two tag libraries with client-side validation and new input component types like Password, Link, Html, ColorPicker. (The first library is Seam and RichFaces, and the second library is simple JSF.) (client-side validation allows internationalization)
8. I also created new field annotations like (password, link, html, javaScriptPattern, formOrder) for complete form generation.
9. Form creation and maintenance is completely handled by the tool. After entity bean updates, fresh forms are auto-generated to match.

More information is available here:

guide

I have also built an example application showing new components and client side validation (tested on 5 main browsers!) It offers also comparison to forms generated by seam-gen.

Currently, you can download FormBuilder from

download

Later I am planning to put it on SourceForge.net.

I welcome any feedback on this work.

Tool does not require Seam! you can also use simple JSF and Facelets.

Tomas

PS: ICEfaces library is on the way