ChameleonForms v3 (Legacy) Documentation

This documentation is for the legacy v3 version of ChameleonForms. To see the documentation for the latest version of ChameleonForms see the new documentation.

Overview

ChameleonForms takes away the pain and repetition of building forms with ASP.NET MVC by following a philosophy of:

  • Model-driven defaults (e.g. enum is drop-down, [DataType(DataType.Password)] is password textbox)
  • DRY up your forms - your forms will be quicker to write and easier to maintain and you won't get stuck writing the same form boilerplate markup form after form after form
  • Consistent - consistency of the API and form structure within your forms and consistency across all forms in your site via templating
  • Declarative syntax - specify how the form is structured rather than worrying about the boilerplate HTML markup of the form; this has the same beneficial effect as separating HTML markup and CSS
  • Beautiful, terse, fluent APIs - it's a pleasure to read and write the code
  • Extensible and flexible core - you can extend or completely change anything you want at any layer of ChameleonForms and you can drop out to plain HTML at any point in your form for those moments where pre-prepared field types and templates just don't cut it

Twitter Bootstrap 3

The ASP.NET MVC application templates now come powered by Bootstrap by default. Have you noticed the gross boilerplate HTML that is repeated again and again in every view though?! Ugh!

ChameleonForms has got you covered; it has built-in support for building forms using Twitter Bootstrap 3!

Example of the code and display of a Chameleon-powered Bootstrap form

Note: The example above shows a vertical layout, but the ASP.NET MVC templates use the horizontal layout. See the Twitter Bootstrap 3 template documentation page to see more about the horizontal form.

What does a ChameleonForms form look like?

So what does a ChameleonForms form look like? Here is a (very) basic example:

@using (var f = Html.BeginChameleonForm()) {
    using (var s = f.BeginSection("Signup for an account")) {
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.FirstName)
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.LastName)
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.Mobile).Placeholder("04XX XXX XXX")
        @s.FieldFor(m => m.LicenseAgreement).InlineLabel("I agree to the terms and conditions")
    }
    using (var n = f.BeginNavigation()) {
        @n.Submit("Create")
    }
}

We expect that you know how to use ASP.NET MVC's form generation, model-binding and validation support to be able to effectively use and understand this library. If you need a hand getting started with that knowledge then see below.

Philosophy

Basic usage

Form structure

Examples for generating a form and each type of default component within the form. The following pages show both the ChameleonForms syntax, as well as the default generated HTML (which you can easily override to suit your own needs).

  • Form - How to output and configure the containing form
  • Message - How to output and configure a message
  • Section - How to output and configure a form section
  • Navigation - How to output and configure a form navigation area and add buttons to it
  • Field - How to output and configure templated fields

Field types

Advanced usage

ASP.NET MVC Posts

If you need a hand getting started with ASP.NET MVC's form generation, model-binding and validation support then see the below.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to this project then feel free to communicate with us via Twitter @robdmoore / @mdaviesnet or alternatively send a pull request / issue to this GitHub project.

Roadmap

Feel free to check out our Trello board. It gives some idea as to the eventual goals we have for the project and the current backlog we are working against. Beware that it's pretty rough around the edges at the moment.