Format

In html you can only use Strings in your attributes like in the value attribute of input {}. To use other data types in your model you have to specify how to represent a specific value as String (e.g. Number, Currency, Date). When you work with input {} you also need parse the entered text back to your data type. For all Kotlin basic types there is a convenience function asString() which generates a Lens from this type to String and vice versa. Therefore, it calls internally the T.toString() and String.toT() functions.

// L object comes from @Lenses annotation on Person data class
val ageLens: Lens<Person, Int> = L.Person.age // cannot used in Tag attributes
val ageLensAsString: Lens<Person, String> = L.Person.age.asString() // now it is useable

fritz2 also provides a special function format() for creating a Lens<P, String> for special types that are not basic:

fun <P> format(parse: (String) -> P, format: (P) -> String): Lens<P, String>

The following validation example demonstrates its usage:

import dev.fritz2.lenses.format

object Formats {
    private val dateFormat: DateFormat = DateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd")
    val date: Lens<Date, String> = format(
        parse = { dateFormat.parseDate(it) },
        format = { dateFormat.format(it) }
    )
}

When you have created a special Lens for your own data type like Formats.date, you can then use it to create a new SubStore: concatenate your Lenses before using them in the sub() method e.g. sub(L.Person.birthday + Fromat.dateLens) or call the method sub() on the SubStore of your custom type P with your formatting Lens e.g sub(Format.dateLens).

Here is the code from the validation example which uses the special Lens in the Formats object specified above for the com.soywiz.klock.Date type:

import com.soywiz.klock.Date
...

val personStore = object : RootStore<Person>(Person(createUUID()))
...
val birthday = personStore.sub(Person.birthday + Format.date)
// or
val birthday = personStore.sub(Person.birthday).sub(Format.date)
...
input("form-control", id = birthday.id) {
    value = birthday.data
    type = const("date")

    changes.values() handledBy birthday.update
}

The resulting SubStore is a Store<String>.

You can of course reuse your custom formatting Lens for every SubStore of the same type (in this case com.soywiz.klock.Date).