Professional Web Forms

Learn the primary mechanism for interactivity on the web.

In this workshop, we'll learn how to use forms on the web to create highly dynamic and interactive experiences for our users.

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Prerequisites

• Some experience with JavaScript
• Some experience with React
• Some experience with Node.js
• Full Stack Foundations workshop (or similar experience)

System Requirements

• git v2.18 or greater
• NodeJS v20 or greater
• npm v8 or greater

All of these must be available in your PATH. To verify things are set up properly, you can run this:

git --version
node --version
npm --version

If you have trouble with any of these, learn more about the PATH environment variable and how to fix it here for windows or mac/linux.

Setup

This is a pretty large project (it's actually many apps in one) so it can take several minutes to get everything set up the first time. Please have a strong network connection before running the setup and grab a snack.

Follow these steps to get this set up:

git clone https://github.com/epicweb-dev/web-forms.git
cd web-forms
npm run setup

If you experience errors here, please open an issue with as many details as you can offer.

Exercises

You'll find all the exercises in the exercises directory. The structure of the workshop apps is described below, but most of the time you should be able to simply run the app and navigate around the different exercises using the application (there are even buttons to open the right exercise file right in your editor).

The purpose of the exercise is not for you to work through all the material. It's intended to get your brain thinking about the right questions to ask me as I walk through the material.

Running the app

To get the app up and running (and really see if it worked), run:

npm start

Now open your browser to the address that's logged out for you and you're good to get started!

Running the tests

The test script in the package.json runs the tests on the solutions (these should all pass). To run the tests against your own work, you simply open the problem page and click the "Test" tab.

Launching your editor

The application has several buttons which will launch your editor to the right file. There are a lot of files in this workshop so you'll be using this feature a lot to get to the right place at the right time.

This should just work™️ (it looks at your currently running processes and chooses the editor based on that). If it doesn't guess correctly, create a .env file in the root of this project and add an environment variable called EPICSHOP_EDITOR with the value being set to the path to your editor's executable. For example, if you're using VS Code on Windows, you'd add this to your .env file:

EPICSHOP_EDITOR='"C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\bin\code.cmd"'

Make certain that if the path includes spaces that you wrap the path in quotes as above (note the use of single quotes wrapping the double quotes!).

The value of EPICSHOP_EDITOR should be the command that you would run in your terminal to open your editor from the command line. This means, the first thing should be the path to the executable for your editor (or the command if you have one in your PATH). So you may be able to get away with doing something as simple as this:

EPICSHOP_EDITOR=code

Exercises

• exercises/*.*/README.md: Exercise background information
• exercises/*.*/*.problem.*/README.*.md: Problem Instructions
• exercises/*.*/*.problem.*/*.tsx: Exercise with Emoji helpers 👈 You spend most of your time here.
• exercises/*.*/*.solution.*/*.tsx: Solved version

The purpose of the exercise is not for you to work through all the material. It's intended to get your brain thinking about the right questions to ask me as I walk through the material.

Helpful Emoji 🐨 🦺 💰 📝 🦉 📜 💣 💪 🏁 👨‍💼 🚨

Each exercise has comments in it to help you get through the exercise. These fun emoji characters are here to help you.

• Kody the Koala 🐨 will tell you when there's something specific you should do
• Lily the Life Jacket 🦺 will help you with any TypeScript-specific parts of the exercises
• Marty the Money Bag 💰 will give you specific tips (and sometimes code) along the way
• Nancy the Notepad 📝 will encourage you to take notes on what you're learning
• Olivia the Owl 🦉 will give you useful tidbits/best practice notes
• Dominic the Document 📜 will give you links to useful documentation
• Barry the Bomb 💣 will be hanging around anywhere you need to blow stuff up (delete code)
• Matthew the Muscle 💪 will indicate that you're working with an exercise
• Chuck the Checkered Flag 🏁 will indicate that you're working with a final
• Peter the Product Manager 👨‍💼 helps us know what our users want
• Alfred the Alert 🚨 will occasionally show up in the test failures with potential explanations for why the tests are failing
• Kellie the Co-worker 🧝‍♀️ your co-worker who sometimes does work ahead of your exercises

Workshop Feedback

Each exercise has an Elaboration and Feedback link. Please fill that out after the exercise and instruction.

At the end of the workshop, please go here to give overall feedback.