Wishlist for Elm form controls

elm-controls-wishlist.md

(TLDR; This is a super naive list, just a few quick thoughts)

I was thinking that perhaps having some kind of % coverage for things that people will need in practice in order to use Elm for rapidly creating nice GUIs. However, I also think there needs to be some kind of (mental, at a minimum) framework for people to work inside so that new controls are easily extensible, styling agnostic, work uniformly with other form controls + validation etc before it can really become mainstream. I'll start adding some thoughts here over time (not much time now) - however, this doesn't cover the second point and I think people still need to get into that before things can really progress very far.

Form handling

• Submit handling, some notes from @rtfeldman : evancz/virtual-dom#5 (comment)

Inputs fields

• display masking (e.g. static slashes and colons for __/__/__, __:__:__ formatting)
• simple inline dropdowns (e.g. dropdown/typeahead for 10 [days/months/years ▼]) and so on.
• ultra-customizable and fast typeahead list
  • I have a reasonbly ok typeahead control I can share, mostly just need to extract a package.
  • Mainly it's missing "effectful" typeahead where ajax is used to fetch results.
• Abstracted numeric/date/etc inputs that don't require both a view model and a domain model (unless, optionally, access to the view model is desired in order to do further detailed customization)

Input handling

• disable/enable form submit on ENTER key
• idiomatic validation: elm-validate by @rtfeldman
  • disable submit + submit button on validation error
  • library with: ranges, numeric, regex etc
  • on events: ENTER key / on blur / on input (or some combination of validations per event type)
  • on asynchronous (ajax) check
  • default / user-friendly validation messages
• keyboard input regex masking as opposed to display masking (e.g. only allow '+' or a decimal to be typed at first and then only decimals after that for telephone numbers +1 xxx xxxxx)

Pickers

• date picker
• color picker

Widgets

• various sliders

Other

• Modals

Probably need to look at other frameworks to get an exhaustive list going. Perhaps:

• Angular UI (Bootstrap)
• Angular UI (other widgets)
• JQuery UI
• etc...

Please feel free to add your own wishes/arguments in a comment below. I haven't done much work on forms in a while my understanding of where things are might be quite out of date.