Text and value input

The controls in this group are the ones a user types a value into: a line of text, a paragraph of it, a date, a colour. They are the simplest controls DomUI has, and everything a control can do is visible on them - which is why the rest of the component documentation compares back to this group.

• The components
• What they have in common
• Which one a form builder picks by itself

The components

What they have in common

All of them are IControl<T>, so all of them answer the same five questions - what is your value, are you read only, are you disabled, why, and are you mandatory - and all of them can be bound and can be handed to a FormBuilder:

Text2<String> title = new Text2<>(String.class);
DateInput2 released = new DateInput2();

FormBuilder fb = new FormBuilder(cp);
fb.label("Album title").mandatory().control(title);
fb.label("Released").control(released);

getValue() is where a control checks its input before handing it over: it reports what is wrong on the control itself and throws, so a click handler that reads three fields stops at the first one that cannot deliver. That mechanism is the same for every control and is described in using components; the pages below only say what this control checks.

The value type is a Text2 speciality. TextArea is always a String, DateInput2 is always a java.util.Date, and the three colour controls are always a String holding six hex digits without a #.

Which one a form builder picks by itself

fb.property(instance, property).control() does not need to be told which control to make: it asks the metadata. From this group it picks

• Text2<T> for a string, a number, or anything else with a converter,
• TextArea when the property's component type hint is textarea,
• DateInput2 for a Date, with the time part switched on when the property's temporal presentation says DATETIME.

What decides that is described in metadata. Making the control yourself, as the examples here do, is what you do when metadata cannot know - a value that is not a property of anything, or a screen that needs a control configured differently from every other use of that property.