My own hackathon: day 8/14

Today I worked on getting the data collection/population of the case entry form.

This was the first of My 3 “Why Angular”s that I wrote about about a year ago: I have large hierarchical dynamic form with lots of pieces of data. With Angular this seems to be easy: you just define ng-model for every field and that’s about it.

With React, I had to come up with my own approach: every component that has a field where user can type data, gets a getValue() method that will return the value of that field. If the component is a section, a container for other field-components, it’s getData() will return a hash with its children’s data, recursively. For example: for a PersonSection, it’d return something like this:

{
  'gen-persoană': 'fizică',
  'nume': 'Cutărescu Ion',
  'idnp': '01234556789',
  ...
}

and for a field-component, say TextField, it’ll return its HTML input’s value. Although I have only used it for PersonSection container component and for the field-components, it seems to work so far.

The one thing that I’m trying to get working now is lists. For example the case — the document in the bailiffs’ world — can have zero or more third-parties. In JSON I’d express that as an array of person-like hashes, but out of the box it doesn’t play well with my React model where, for example, every PersonSection component has a ref name, like creditorul and its getData() returns values in the child field-components like this:

{
  'creditorul': {
    ... // all the fields go here
  }
}

which in my NewCaseDialog component looks like this:

For third parties, I have an array like this:

{
  'părţi-terţe': [
    { ... },
    { ... }
  ]
}

which doesn’t translate well to components having a ref. The way I’m thining to go around this it by adding the array index to the ref name, for example:

and then in getValue() detect these series of refs and return them all as an array under persoane-terţe, which should work.

It doesn’t right now, there is a bug somewere, and I think that it may be time to start writing unit tests: I already feel the fear of breaking things. The Valuable mixin that contain all the data collection/population it’s getting a git hairy — although it’s only two days-old — and I’m thinking to TDD it, just to see what would come out.

Since the web-based implementation of this — a few years ago — failed exactly because of the mess that I made, it shouldn’t be a hard choice. As Uncle Bob says:

The only way to go fast is to go well.

I think he’s right.

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