Feedback v0.x

[rostockahoi]

Hi there,

first thing: nice work on Arcanist so far!

I successfully implemented a job board with application forms using Arcanist. Here's my feedback for potential future versions:

• I think, not in all cases but quite a bit, it is a requirement to start a wizard that is related to a specific DB model (or even multiple). In my case an applicant applies to a specific job. I can imagine a job platform where one could apply to multiple jobs at a time.
  • With the help of Kai I solved this by having a hidden first step that receives the job ID as payload. While this works obviously, it feels a little fancy. Maybe there is a more integrated approach?
• I'd love to have the Database adapter to be configurable to use UUIDs as primary key. Otherwise it is not possible to have public wizards saved to the database because another user can just guess wizard IDs. For now I used a custom Session adapter to prevent anyone else other than the applicant to access a running wizard.
• At my company we heavily depend on Vue Formulate to create schema based forms. This way, we stopped worrying about actual form markup, just "describe" the form and that's it. I implemented Vue Formulate with Inertia and Arcanist and did some fancy stuff to be able to just define the fields of a wizard step once and oh boy, it's not ideal.
  • I could imagine having a VueFormulateResponseRenderer but I cannot wrap my head around how Inertia fits there. Maybe it should be a VueFormulateInertiaResponseRenderer lol.
  • Of course I could just define the fields in Arcanist and put the Vue Formulate form schema into its step template but I want to avoid having field definitions in two different places.

[rostockahoi]

Another semi-related thing I noticed during development: If wizards are public and ask for personal information (GDPR) in the first wizard step it is properly speaking not allowed to not have a privacy consent field in the first step. Just saying.

This is because the user certainly is not aware that the first step is already sent to the server and persisted - which requires consent.