Repopulating form fields in Play Framework

Question

Using the Play Framework (2.6) documentation; I am attempting to handle form submission. But I'm running into an issue in repopulating the form fields - which is what I want to do if it has errors (so users can edit their entry rather than having to re-enter).

   newForm.bindFromRequest.fold(

     errorForm => {
       BadRequest(views.html.form(errorForm))
     },
     formData => {
       val oWriteJso = Json.toJsObject(formData) match {
         case x if(x.fields.nonEmpty) => getCreatedFieldValues(x)
         case _ => None
       }
       val oRes = Redirect(routes.Application.index).flashing("success" -> "Entry saved!")
       apiC.writeAndRedirect("c", collName, None, oWriteJso)(oRes)(request)

     }

   )

My issue is that the example in the documentation only shows how to pass errorForm directly to a form template (e.g. views.html.form) rather than being able to render the whole page again (i.e. using views.html.index or a Redirect) with the input form fields being populated from the previous request. I found this answer as the closest to this issue but it is a little old and I am using Scala so wasn't able to implement it. Just have no idea how anyone else is doing this or what the sensible, standard approach is. Thanks for any light on this_

Answer 1

If you use the Play helper functions for generating input tags in your view file. They should populate with your values from the last request.

For example you can create an HTML form in your view file using helper methods like this:

@helper.form(action = routes.Application.userPost()) {
  @helper.inputText(userForm("name"))
  @helper.inputText(userForm("age"))
}

You can take a look at Play documentation about helpers in view files at the following link:

https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.7.x/ScalaForms#Showing-forms-in-a-view-template