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Angular Forms and Validations

22 Jul 2022
Intermediate
7.61K Views

Forms are the mandatory building blocks of a web application. You use forms for various activities like user login or signup, book a flight, place an order, etc.

In this article, you will learn about different ways of creating forms in Angular. Angular provides two ways to create forms – Template Driven and Model-Driven.

Types of Angular Forms

Angular Form Building Blocks

The basic building blocks of an Angular form are FormsGroup, FormControl, FormArray, and Validations.

Angular Form Building Blocks

Angular Form and Form Controls States

Angular Forms and their controls do change in their states as the user starts interaction with the form input controls. This state transition is helpful to get the information about the form and its input control state. Based upon the get information you can show or hide error messages and even you can check the validity of the form.

Angular Form and Form Controls States

States Transition

  1. untouched => touched

  2. invalid => valid

  3. pristine => dirty

Angular Form Validations

Angular Form Validations are based on HTML5 validations. Angular Form Validations validate the user input for accuracy and completeness. All validations are performed on the client side.

Angular Forms Built-In Validation

  1. required

  2. minlength

  3. maxlength

  4. pattern

  5. email – supports in Ng4

  6. min

  7. max

Template Driven Form

In template-driven forms, we don't create Angular form control objects but Angular directives create them for us using the information from our data binding configuration.

We don't have to push and pull data values because Angular handles that for you using the ngModel directive and Angular updates the mutable data model according to user changes as they happen while using the form.

Template-driven Form is set up and configured in HTML Code. Template-driven Form is easy to use and suits simple form. Template-driven Form uses directives (ngForm, ngModel) and reference name(#refName) for creating forms.

Template Driven Form

Model-Driven Form

The model-driven form is set up and configured in the component class. It is based on a reactive style of programming where you use the underlying APIs FormControl and FormGroup that track the value and validation status. Reactive forms offer ease of testing and validation.

Model Driven Form

Template Driven vs. Model Driven Form

Template Driven
Model-Driven Form
The form is set up and configured in HTML Code
The form is set up and configured in the component class using FormBuilder
Easy and suits for simple form
Flexible and suits for complex form
Two-way data binding
No data binding(immutable data model)
Automatically track form and input element state
Reactive Transformation that can react to changes in data across the app
The form is passed to the component class via ngSubmit()
The form can be accessed in the component class without passing it via ngSubmit()
Unit Testing is complex
Unit Testing is easy

Neither of them is better than the other. Template-driven and Model-driven are two different architectural paradigms with their pros and con so we can choose the approach that works best for you or according to our business requirement. This way, we are free to decide to use both in the same application accordingly.
What do you think?

Forms are almost always present in any website or application because user input is one of the commonly used required features. Forms can be used to perform countless data-entry tasks such as account creation, login, placing orders, finding records, online bidding, and so on.

Building easy-to-use forms require design and user experience skills, as well as a framework with support for two-way data binding, change tracking, validation, and error handling such as Angular.

I would like to have feedback from my blog readers. Your valuable feedback, question, or comments about this article are always welcome.

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