Click here to watch Fun with Forms in Drupal 8

Drupal 8’s Form API is a continuation of an idea that was started way back in Drupal 4.x and provides a convenient, secure, predictable and incredibly useful abstraction for creating and processing HTML forms. Once you know how to use it. And you really should.

Drupal is built around forms. Adding content, creating users, building views, and configuring basic settings all happen via filling out and submitting a form. Forms are arguably one of the most important parts of a Content Management System.

This session will walk through the complete life cycle of a standard Drupal 8 form from the fingertips of the developer, to the end user's browser and back to Drupal for error checking and processing. You’ll learn how to create a form for users to fill out and then how to handle both validation and processing of the information collected.

Learning objectives:

After this session attendees will be able to:

• Know what the Form API is and when to use it.
• Understand the complete processing workflow of a form in Drupal.
• Create your own forms leveraging the Form API.
• Understand FormInterface, FormBase and other form related classes.
• Encapsulate complex form interactions into reusable elements.
• List the major differences between Drupal 7 & 8’s Form API.

This session will cover the Form API in depth and contains content applicable to both experienced developers and those just starting out with forms in Drupal. It is especially relevant for developers who want to better understand the inner workings of the Form API and some of the major differences in the Form API for Drupal 8.

The content of this session will be Drupal 8 focused however much of the form building and processing workflow information will be just as useful for Drupal 7 where the overall process is much the same even though the mechanics are different.

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about what goes on behind the scenes when you click that submit button this is where you’ll find out.