[enhancement] add api endpoints for retrieving form schemas

So what I mean is to be able to make a GET request to something like /api/books/create.json and then get a json back which defines which fields are accepted for a create-action and what validation those fields have. And then of course also for /api/books/edit.json, since sometimes those two actions have different fields and validation associated with them.

Then I could write a service which translates that schema into a schema that for example Angular Formly can understand and boom! Automatic form generation directly from the entities themselves!

[theofidry]

I perfectly understand the problem and there’s been a few attempts at solving it by generating an Angular form based on a json config, which could easily be dumped from the back-end for example. Or simply have those “isomorphic” apps where sharing this peculiar bit of code can be easier. It’s just that there is no clear way to go at the moment as it depends a lot of your front-end stack and how you manage forms there.

My suggestion would be to experiment more in that area and if the solution is satisfying, then we could consider having it in the a core or as part of the ecosystem maintained by the core team. For example an idea would be to have a generator for Angular2 able to read the Symfony validator config and partially generate the code for the validation from it, although there’s bound to have dubious edge cases and this doesn’t solve the issue of maintaining a parity between the front-end/back-end. Then there’s the question of how portable that would be to other JS frameworks, how many of them should be supported…

[Simperfit]

@theofidry @Evertt Maybe you should be looking in what @dunglas has done in the api-platform/admin repository