This library uses Tanstack Form under the hood. It works by letting you pass configurable options related to InstantDB, and also allows passing any custom options to Tanstack Form. It then handles updates and syncing for you.

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Example - Simple Form

This is a simple example of an update form for the Items table. It doesn’t cover all the available features, but should give you a good starting point.

  1. Passing your schema, db, entity name, and query will allow the form to be typesafe and automatically sync when changes are made
  2. Use the tanstack options to pass any custom options to the Tanstack Form instance. We automatically give you access to handleIDBUpdate and handleIDBCreate which can be called to automatically update/create in InstantDB with the latest values in the form. zodSchema is also automatically created for you based on your Instant schema.
  3. Write your UI components using the form.Field component. This component is a wrapper around the Tanstack Form Field component, and automatically gives you typesafe field values.
import { useIDBForm, getErrorMessageForField } from "instantdb-react-ui";

function InstantDBReactUIForm() {
	const form = useIDBForm({
		idbOptions: {
			type: 'update',
			schema: schema,
			db: db,
			entity: 'items',
			query: { items: { $: { limit: 1 } } },
		},
		tanstackOptions: ({ handleIDBUpdate, zodSchema }) => ({
			validators: { onChange: zodSchema },
			listeners: {
				onChange: ({ formApi }) => {
					formApi.validate('change');
					console.log(formApi.state.values);
					if (formApi.state.isValid) handleIDBUpdate();
				},
			},
		}),
	});

	return (
		<div>
			<form.Field
				name="name"
				children={field => (
					<TextInput
						label="Name"
						name={field.name}
						value={field.state.value}
						onChange={e => field.handleChange(e.target.value)}
						error={getErrorMessageForField(field)}
					/>
				)}
			/>
		</div>
	);
}

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TanStack Form Reference

Form state is managed under the hood using the @tanstack/react-form library with the useForm hook. See the docs for more information. You can pass all of the original useForm parameters to the tanstackOptions object. form.Field also uses the same API, so you have access to all tanstack form field values, such as field.state.meta

TanStack Form Docs

Read the reference for the useForm hook

In the next page, we’ll cover a more complex example with all of the available features, including creating a reusable component that works for both create and update forms, handling relationship picker fields, debouncing, and more.