RFC: Deprecate AutoForm dependencies API in favour of DiscriminatedUnion - abandoned

[HaNdTriX]

This proposal proposes an alternative to the AutoForm.dependencies api.

Why

I believe the AutoForm dependencies API should be part of the schema itself. Otherwise we get a typical split brain problem, where one information is stored in multiple places.

From my point of view the DependencyType API is not needed, since we can replace these by z.DiscriminatedUnion and:

Zod	AutoForm.DependencyType
z.never()	DependencyType.HIDES
!z.optional()	DependencyType.REQUIRES
!z.enum()	DependencyType.SETS_OPTIONS

Example

const formSchema = z.object({
  type: z.enum(["my-number", "my-string", 'my-enum', 'nothing']).default("my-number"),
  foo: z.discriminatedUnion("type", [
    z.object({
      type: z.literal("my-number"),
      data: z.number().default(42).optional(),
    }),
    z.object({
      type: z.literal("my-string"),
      data: z.string().default("some string"),
    }),
    z.object({
      type: z.literal("my-enum"),
      data: z.enum(['foo', 'bar', 'baz']).default('foo')
    }),
    z.object({
      type: z.literal("nothing"),
      data: z.never()
    }),
  ]),
});

This increases the usability of zod and makes our AutoForms more declarative.

Code (Proof of Concept)

To add discriminatedUnion to your Auto Form check out the following commit: HaNdTriX/vue-auto-form-discriminated-union@6f346b5

Resources

• Demo: https://handtrix.github.io/vue-auto-form-discriminated-union/
• Source: https://github.com/HaNdTriX/vue-auto-form-discriminated-union
• Docs: https://zod.dev/?id=discriminated-unions

Feedback

I would love to get some early Feedback on this Idea. What do you think?