Framework: View Prototypes And Render-Time Views

A View is a short-living object that is created and computed during page rendering. You can also create a pre-configured a View object prototype in advance, and then clone it for rendering.

It's important not to execute render-time properties while configuring the prototype.

Use view() helper function to create render-time view instances, and mark render-time properties using #[RenderTime] attribute to prevent accessing them before rendering.

Here is how I came up to that:

• Problem
• Solution

Problem

In Osm Admin, the form field displays a property value, or a value returned by a formula. Either way, while preparing a query, the field adds the formula to a query using $query->select() method:

public function prepare(Query $query): void
{
    $query->select($this->formula);
}

Every formula has an associated control that specifies the editing markup and behavior. But for some reason, when accessing the parsed formula, I get an error saying that Query::$http_query property is not set.

What's going on?

Solution

You see, there are actually two Form objects. One is a part of the schema, it's stored in the Table::$form property. The other is created by cloning the form from the schema using the view() function in the EditPage route:

protected function get_form_view(): Form|View {
    $form = view($this->table->form_view);

    $form->http_query = $this->http->query;

    return $form;
}

The idea here is that the former is a preconfigured form prototype, while the latter is created every time the form is actually rendered. Render-time propertied should only be evaluated on the view created using the view() function.

To distinguish the two, I added View::$rendering property that is only true if a view is created using the view() helper function, and #[RenderTime] attribute for marking properties that can only be touched during rendering.

And indeed, the code in the Field render-time properties access the form object from schema, not the one created for rendering.

The problem is that the whole form/.../field view tree is stored in the schema, and cloning the form object in the view() function should also clone all child views.

I've changed the view() function accordingly, and, indeed, it helped.