Harnessing the Power Strictly Typed Forms in Angular: A Simple Tutorial

When working with Angular, handling forms is a common task. However, forms can get complicated very quickly, and ensuring type safety can become a struggle.

That's where Angular Typed Forms come in. Let's dive into how we can leverage typed forms to make our applications more robust.

Understanding Angular Typed Forms

Angular provides two ways to work with forms: template-driven and reactive. While both have their benefits, reactive forms provide more flexibility and are better suited for working with typed forms.

Angular Typed Forms is an innovative approach to reactive forms that brings strong typing into the picture. With typed forms, you define your form controls and groups using interfaces, helping you to maintain type safety.
 

Setting Up a Book Collection Typed Form

Suppose we're working on a form for a book collection. We'll start by defining an interface for our form data.

interface BookForm {
  title: string;
  author: string;
  genre: string[];
  publicationYear: number;
}

Now, we'll use this interface to create a typed form group.

const bookForm = new FormGroup<BookForm>({
  title: new FormControl(''),
  author: new FormControl(''),
  genre: new FormArray<string>([]),
  publicationYear: new FormControl(''),
});

Manipulating Typed Form Values

One of the most common operations on forms is getting and setting values. With typed forms, this becomes straightforward, and the compiler will warn you if you're accessing or assigning properties that do not exist on the interface.

// Getting values
const bookTitle = bookForm.controls.title.value;

// Setting values
bookForm.controls.publicationYear.setValue(2023);

Working with Form Arrays

Form arrays are used when you have a variable set of controls. With typed forms, you can handle form arrays with ease.

Here's how you add a new genre to the array in our book form:

bookForm.controls.genre.push(new FormControl('Science Fiction'));

This way, working with forms becomes more intuitive, and you get the benefit of strong typing, which prevents many common mistakes that might be overlooked when dealing with 'any' types.
 
 

Conclusion

By using Angular Typed Forms, we ensure that our forms are type safe. It brings in an extra layer of security to our applications by enabling us to leverage TypeScript's powerful typing.

It makes our code cleaner, easier to understand, and less prone to errors. The typed forms provide a simple, yet innovative way to handle the complexities of form management in Angular, making your development process much more efficient and enjoyable.

Thanks for reading, and happy coding🤘!