Feature: #69401 - Adopt ext:form to support the Extbase/ Fluid MVC stack

See forge#69401

Description

Short summery

The form extension - including the custom data model, controller logic, property validation, views and templating - has been adopted to support the Extbase/ Fluid MVC stack. This allows better customization and control of the generated behavior and markup by simply modifying Fluid templates or utilizing own custom view helper logic. At the same time the rewrite must not break current setups, i.e. the frontend rendering must be as compatible as possible.

Details

Fluid Rendering

The rendering of the frontend output is based on Fluid. Form relies on the native Fluid viewhelpers of the core and ships 2 new viewhelpers for optimal rendering of the SELECT object including the support of OPTGROUP objects. Furthermore a viewhelper is included to optimize the output of text mails.

To support existing setups a compatibility mode is introduced. The mode is activated by default. This has no impact on the rendering as long as no "old" TypoScript settings (like .layout =) are present. If old rendering settings are used a compatibility theme is loaded which guarantees maximum backwards compatibility including all the different wrap-abilities like containerWrap and elementWrap.

For new installations it is recommended to switch off the compatibility mode and use own Fluid templates to customize the output.

For each form object and view a Fluid partial is available. There are 3 views: the form itself (show), the confirmation page (confirmation) and the email (postProcessor/ mail). The patch allows to customize the frontend output for every single view, e.g. one can have a custom Fluid partial for the BUTTON object of the confirmation view.

The partialRootPath can be overridden or extended to customize the form objects on a global scope. Furthermore it is possible to set a partial path for each form element on a local scope.

10 = BUTTON
10 {
        label = My button
        name = myButton
        partialPath = FlatElements/MyButton
}

The Fluid rendering would look for a MyButton.html located in the defined partialRootPath.

In addition it is now possible to decide if an element should be rendered for a specific view. The visualisation can be adopted by using the TypoScript settings visibleInShowAction, visibleInConfirmationAction and visibleInMail. As an example, this is utilized to hide the FIELDSET object on the confirmation page which was the default behaviour in earlier versions of form.

Extensibility

It is now possible to register custom form objects and attributes easily only by using TypoScript and Fluid. Form attributes can now be cObjects and use stdWrap. This is only possible if the form was not designed within the form wizard.

Furthermore 2 new signal slots are implemented to allow the manipulation of the form objects and the submitted data.

Validation

The validators are now using the extbase property mapping validation process.

Additional information

The session handling was dropped since it was unstable (see #58765). Now form relies on the concepts of Extbase.

The unit tests have been adopted to reflect the code changes.

Future

Further patches are needed to adopt the form wizard. The wizard still works as it used to after applying this patch but it is not able to reflect the new features like choosing a partial path for a single element.

Another patch will take care of the documentation.

A few more patches will come which will fix some issues regarding the validators and filters.