html-json-forms

An implementation of the HTML JSON Form specification for use with the Django REST Framework. Extracted from wq.db for general use.

HTML JSON Forms use an array-style naming convention that makes it possible to represent complex nested JSON objects with regular HTML fields. The idea is that client applications (such as wq.app) and eventually browsers could parse these fields and submit structured JSON to the server. For backwards compatibility with older clients, the spec recommends implementing a fallback parser on the server to ensure that older clients can submit forms using the traditional method. This Python package is an implementation of that algorithm.

<!-- Input -->
<form>
  <input name="items[0][name]" value="Example">
  <input name="items[0][count]" value="5">
</form>

// Output
{
    "items": [
        {
            "name": "Example",
            "count": "5"
        }
    ]
}

Note that the HTML JSON Form spec was never finalized. The implementation is still useful as a formal way of representing structured data via traditional HTML forms.

Usage

html-json-forms is available via PyPI:

pip3 install html-json-forms

Functional

from html_json_forms import parse_json_form

parse_json_form({
    'items[0][name]': "Example",
    'items[0][count]': "5",
})

DRF Integration

To enable HTML JSON Form parsing in Django REST Framework, subclass JSONFormSerializer:

from rest_framework import serializers
from html_json_forms.serializers import JSONFormSerializer
from .models import Parent, Child

class ChildSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Child

class ParentSerializer(JSONFormSerializer, serializers.ModelSerializer):
    children = ChildSerializer(many=True)
    class Meta:
        model = Parent

# Alternatively you can use the pre-mixed JSONFormModelSerializer:
# class ParentSerializer(JSONFormModelSerializer):
#    ...

Note that only the top-level serializer needs to have the JSONFormSerializer mixin; the nested serializers will "just work" as if the data had been submitted via JSON. Note further that this module only handles processing nested form data; it is still up to you to figure out how to handle writing nested models (unless you are using wq.db's patterns module, which includes writable nested serializers by default).