[November 2022 Update] Want an easier way to add forms to a store?
Shopify Forms is now available—a free email capture app that works seamlessly with discounts, Shopify Email, marketing automations, and more. Set up on-brand forms, select when and where they'll show up, and track their performance in Shopify.
Install appIf you build forms on Shopify, you know that they’re used across a range of touchpoints on Shopify stores, from customer registration, to blog commenting, to contacting merchants, and even adding product variants to the cart. Since forms carry a lot of responsibility for connecting your client with their customers, it’s crucial that these components are robust and user-friendly.
It’s easy to overlook the importance of forms in favor of more dynamic components of your client’s online stores likeShopify metafields. But in terms of functionality, forms play a very important role in how customers interact with a store.
"Forms play a very important role in how customers interact with a store."
Creating forms can often be repetitive, and mistakes can occur when building them from scratch. Thankfully, there are a number of Liquid elements that make working with forms easier and more reliable by automatically generating the code necessary for transferring data to the correct endpoint.
In this article, we look at how Liquid can be leveraged to simplify the process when you build forms on Shopify by generating input elements, identifying errors, and outputting feedback to customers. We’ll also be looking at which form types developers have access to when creating different forms.
Grow your business with the Shopify Partner Program
你是否提供web设计和开发就是ces or want to build apps for the Shopify App Store, the Shopify Partner Program will set you up for success. Join for free and access revenue share opportunities, developer preview environments, and educational resources.
Sign upWhat is theform
tag?
Theform
Liquid tag generates an HTMLelement along with the necessary inputs to send submitted data to a specific endpoint. Using this tag automates the process of assigning actions and values when building different types of forms on Shopify pages.
Thisform
标记允许开发人员快速和可靠地添加forms to their projects, without having to write the full code to describe which action to take, or which endpoint the form will be targeting. This means it saves time and reduces the potential for human error when building forms for logging in, commenting on blog posts, and contacting merchants.
When theform
tag is used with a specified type, an HTMLelement is created along with input elements that are used by the endpoint to decide what to do with the submitted data on what exact action to take. Depending on which form type is being implemented, a different set of inputs will be generated to perform the required action.
The automatically created input fields are intended to connect with Shopify’s server endpoints, and there are no input fields created by theform
tag that users would interact with. This means developers will manually add input fields for customer emails or passwords, while the tag takes care of sending data to Shopify’s servers.
You might also like:How to Display Price Ranges on Shopify Collection Pages.
An example of theform
tag
As we’ve learned, theform
tag is a more reliable alternative to building a form in HTML. For example, if you were creating a customer login form, without using theform
tag, you’d need to create something like the following:
Theform
tag can take care of all the above code with this simplified markup:
{% form 'customer_login' %}
{% endform %}
We can see from this example that the openingform
tag also includes a “type,” which in this case iscustomer_login
. There are13 different form typesthat generate specificand
elements for each particular purpose. We’ll be looking at the currently available form types later.
While theform
tag does create the necessaryand
sending data to a specific endpoint, we’ll need to create the input elements that your client’s customers will be interacting with.
For example, to make our customer login form functional, we’ll need to create fields to input an email address, password, and submit button. Once these are added into theform
tags, it should appear like this:
如果我们把这个形式从辊筒的前端ine store we should see this:
You can view a full working model of a customer login form on ourLiquid Code Examples, and even use this as a basis for your own theme builds.
Additional parameters
In some cases, additional parameters need to be added within theform
tag to target a specific object. For example, the form used to submit a comment on a blog article requires the type ofnew_comment
and needs an article object as a parameter:
{% form 'new_comment', article %}
{% endform %}
This will output to:
In this example, thearticle
parameter will allow the form to associate the new comment with the correct blog post. Forms for products, customer addresses, and new article comments all require additional parameters.
The different Liquid form types
There are 13 different Liquid form types for specific touchpoints where customers would be interacting with a client’s store or submitting data. As we’ve seen from our customer registration example, to generate a form, theform
tag requires a type.
"There are 13 different Liquid form types for specific touchpoints where customers would be interacting with a client’s store or submitting data."
These predefined form types are:
activate_customer_password
contact
currency
customer
create_customer
customer_address
customer_login
guest_login
new_comment
product
recover_customer_password
reset_customer_password
storefront_password
Examples of each of these forms and any additional required parameters are demonstrated inour Help Center.
Sign up for our Developer Digest newsletter
Stay up to date with the recent changes to Shopify APIs and other developer products with our quarterly Developer Digest.
Sign upUsing conditional logic within forms
Certain types of forms may require extra functionality, like resetting a forgotten password, or displaying an error when invalid data is submitted. We can usecontrol flow tagsto set up rules that will display content when a specific event occurs, such as displaying an error message when an email address is incorrectly entered.
The Liquid objectform.errors
and the Liquid filterdefault_errors
are very helpful in cases where data is not submitted successfully through a form, as they allow you to display default error messages.
Theform.errors
object will output or return an array of strings if a form was not submitted successfully. The strings returned depend on which fields of the form were left empty or contained errors. Possible values which can be returned are:
author
body
email
form
This object allows us to identify and output which part of a form was not entered correctly. If we want to display what type of error a customer has made, we could set up an iteration for loop like this:
{% for error in form.errors %}
{{ error }}
{% endfor %}
In the case above, if a customer entered an invalid email address, the valueemail
would be outputted. Now we can use this returned output and apply thedefault_errors
filter to automatically generate a predefined error message.
Thedefault_errors
filter will return a specific message based on the string returned by theform.errors
object. To see this in practice, we would use control-flow tags to create the followingif
statement within our{% form %}
tags:
{% if form.errors %}
{{ form.errors | default_errors }}
{% endif %}
Now, if a user entered an invalid email address, they would see the following message:
Please enter a valid email address.
Adding these conditional rules to your custom theme builds are crucial to ensure that your client’s customers see the correct feedback if they have entered invalid data. In this way, Liquid can be leveraged to provide visible and specific error messages to your client’s customers at the right time.
You might also like:How to Customize the img Element in Shopify Themes.
Form and function
Now that you’ve seen how Liquid objects, tags, and filters can be implemented together to create robust forms, you can extend the functionality when you build forms on Shopify byadding custom fieldsbased on your client’s requirements, ormodifying the form attributes.
However you adjust or iterate on how you build and design your forms, making use of the relevant Liquid elements will ensure your forms are robust and consistent. Hopefully with the help of this article, you will be more familiar with how Liquid can improve your forms and theme projects.
How have you used forms in your projects?Let us know in the comments below!