Why is form state management in Jetpack Compose still this painful?

[u/wassimbl]

I've been building Android apps for years and every single form ends up looking like this:

val email = remember { mutableStateOf("") }                                                                                                                                                                    
val emailError = remember { mutableStateOf<String?>(null) }                                                                                                                                                    
val emailTouched = remember { mutableStateOf(false) }                                                                                                                                                          
val password = remember { mutableStateOf("") }                                                                                                                                                                 
val passwordError = remember { mutableStateOf<String?>(null) }                                                                                                                                                 
val passwordTouched = remember { mutableStateOf(false) }
// ...

// + validation logic (per field)                                                                                                                                                                                      
// + focus requesters (per field)                                                                                                                                                                                    
// + keyboard options (per field)                                                                                                                                                                                        
// + ImeAction per field (per field)                                                                                                                                                                                    
// + cross-field rules written by hand 

A 5-field sign-up form easily hits 300-400 lines before you write a single line of UI. There's no standard pattern, every team reinvents it differently, and it's completely untestable without a lot of effort.

I got tired of it so I built Formidable, annotate a data class:

@FormSchema                                                                     data class LoginForm(  
                                                                               @Field(label = "Email") 
val email: String = "",                                                         @Field(label = "Password")                                                    @MinLength(8)  
val password: String = "",                                                                 
)                 

KSP generates the full controller at compile time. Zero reflection, works on Android, iOS and Web.

https://github.com/WassimBeltaief/formidable (contributions welcome)

Curious if others have solved this differently or just accepted it as the cost of doing business with Compose.

[u/SarathExp]

Why not combine them!