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nicklockwood/FXForms

★ 2,911 · Objective-C · NOASSERTION · updated Apr 2019

[DEPRECATED]

FXForms is an Objective-C library for building table-based forms on iOS by reflecting over your model's properties — declare typed properties, get a working form with appropriate keyboards, pickers, and switches automatically inferred. It was useful for settings screens in pre-Swift iOS apps. It has been explicitly deprecated since 2019 and targets iOS 7–9.

The introspection-based approach was genuinely clever: camelCase-to-title-case conversion, automatic keyboard type selection for email/password/URL fields, and KVO-compatible two-way binding all worked without configuration. The custom cell registration system (per-type, per-class, or global) gave a real escape hatch for one-off fields without forking the library. The FXFormController/FXFormViewController split let you embed forms without being forced into a specific view controller hierarchy. Value transformer support (block or NSValueTransformer) handled display formatting cleanly without polluting the model.

Deprecated since 2019 with no migration path offered — the README just says 'migrate to another solution' without naming one. Objective-C runtime introspection means it falls apart with Swift value types and strongly-typed collections; the workarounds required are awkward. The 'stringly typed' key-path cell configuration (setting textLabel.color via a dictionary key) bypasses the compiler entirely, so typos silently do nothing. No tests for the core introspection logic in the repo — the test suite appears minimal given the complexity of the field inference code.

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