Date: 2022-01-03
Accepted
The domain request form by which registrants apply for a .gov domain is presented over many pages.
Because we use server-side rendering, each page of the domain request is a unique HTML page with form fields surrounded by a form tag.
Needing a way to coordinate state between the pages as a user fills in their domain request, we initially used the Form wizard from django-formtools. This eventually proved unworkable due to the lack of native ability to have more than one Django form object displayed on a single HTML page.
However, a significant portion of the user workflow had already been coded, so it seemed prudent to port some of the formtools logic into our codebase.
To maintain each page of the domain request as its own Django view class, inheriting common code from a parent class.
To maintain Django form and formset class in accordance with the Django models whose data they collect, independently of the pages on which they appear.
The wizard implementation is now unique to our codebase, which will impact developer onboarding, in the form of additional time needed to understand how it works.
A small amount of additional code to maintain is introduced. Impact is likely to be minor. Library functions which were not needed by our implementation were not ported.