React has two ways of handling forms: controlled and uncontrolled. But what does that mean? And when would you want to use one or the other? Let’s take a look.
Coming into my fifth and final portfolio project for my online software engineering bootcamp, I knew that submitting an app with zero styling would be unacceptable. I looked at some of my options, including styling completely from scratch by writing all of the CSS myself (and quickly decided I do NOT have the CSS expertise nor the stylistic eye for this to be very reasonable), bootstrap, and semantic-ui. I found that semantic-ui had really accessable and thourough and documentation, and some pretty cool features to choose from, so chose that route.
Here we are, at our fourth portfolio project of the course, and I have to admit that I was more scared going into this one than any of the previous projects. We had only studied JavaScript for three weeks at the point of beginning our projects, and it felt like we had covered so much material, I was nearly paralyzed at the idea of even narrowing down where to start! One of the things that was striking me as entirely mystifying was constructor and prototype functions - but after lots of digging (and some incredibly helpful chats with classmates), I’ve found that these are both quite simple.
I’ve officially passed the half way point in my Flatiron School’s Online Software Engineering Bootcamp with the completion of my third out of five portfolio projects. Going into the start of this project, I was a lot more confident than I have been for the previous two. I had a solid idea about the web application that I wanted to make, and I felt pretty good about my RoR skills as they had progressed throught the labs - which put me WAY ahead of where I’d been with my CLI gem and Sinatra projects, where I’d spent honestly more than half the project week just trying to wrap my head around where to start!
For our second portfolio project for the Online Software Engineering program at Flatiron, we were asked to create a web application using Sinatra, sql, and ActiveRecord that had secure user logins, used multiple models, had at least one has_many and one belongs_to relationship, and was controlled by a application_controler. After brainstorming for nearly a week and talking to other people about what a simple problem or annoyance that we all face regularly that might be able to be solved with a simple record-keeping web app, I settled on trying to create a program that would let a user save restaurants when they discover them and look back through thier lists and other user’s lists when they want to - I mean, who HASN’T had the experience of deciding to go out to eat with friends or family, only to have their minds go completely blank when they’re trying to pick a place to go?!