Drupal forms

Overview

The "Lupus Decoupled Form" sub-module makes it easy to support Drupal forms in a decoupled frontend. The form HTML is rendered by Drupal and wrapped in a <drupal-form> custom element, such that the frontend can easily add some styling or custom JS-enhancements.

At the moment, progressive form submissions are supported, which work without JavaScript. JavaScript enhanced form submissions are currently not a priority, but can be achieved with some additional JavaScript code, see Issue #3471135 for some code to get started.

How does it work?

Generally, Drupal renders the form as usual. The resulting HTML markup is wrapped into a <drupal-form-{FORM-ID}> component, which simply shows the server-rendered HTML of the form. When the form is submitted, the frontend takes care of forwarding the POST request to the backend, where it's processed as usual. After form processing the request is rendered in a custom element response again: Either the page response contains a reloaded form or a redirect. Any messages for form validation fails or success are handled as usual via the Drupal message system and sent as part of the next page response. Thus, subsequently the frontend takes care of rendering the response appropriately in a new page or redirect response - just as it does for any other server-render page.

Frontend support

• For the Nuxt frontend, The Nuxtjs Drupal-CE Connector module ships with a suiting default component: drupal-form--default.vue
• There is server middleware which takes care of handling the POST request and renders the response.

Rendering forms in the frontend

Generally, the drupal-form--default component may be used to add form styles and JavaScript as suiting, either generally for all forms via the default component, or individually by customizing things in a per-form component drupal-form--{FORM-ID}. Any Drupal CSS or JavaScript assets for the form elements won't be included in the decoupled frontend, thus the frontend needs to take care of providing suiting replacement style and scripts as necessary.

In order to change the HTML markup of forms, the form elements need to be themed in Drupal.

Theming form elements

Since the markup is generated by Drupal, the HTML of individual form elements can be altered only by adjusting the Drupal markup with the help of a Drupal theme:

• For having a clean, semantic output of forms, the lupus-stark theme has been created - which adds suiting Drupal twig files to do away unnecessary Drupal-isms. That way decent markup is generated and necessary style adaptions are made possible by targeting elements using the reasonable default classes.
• Generally, the active Drupal theme can be customized by setting the theme as site-wide standard theme. If the form is on a Drupal admin page, the Admin Theme will be applied though.
• The module adds support for a special '_theme' key in route definitions, what allows Drupal developers to switch themes to the given theme-name specifically for the form routes, as preferred.

Supported Drupal forms

Lupus Decoupled ships with further sub-modules that enable support for further Drupal-forms as desired:

• Lupus Decoupled Contact Forms - Adds support for the contact forms provided by the core contact module.
• Lupus Decoupled User Forms - Enables using Drupal user login and user password reset forms in the frontend. That way, user may login while getting a separate frontend cookie. Please refer to the Authentication page for details.

If you miss support for some Drupal form, please open an issue in the Lupus Decoupled issue queue to add it! Please refer to the page Adding Drupal Forms for documentation on how this is done.