Initialization

To add dhtmlxForm into an application, you need to take the following simple steps:

Download the Form package and unpack it into a folder of your project
Include source files
Create a container
Define Form structure
Initialize Form with the object constructor

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>How to Start with dhtmlxForm</title>         
        <script type="text/javascript" src="../../codebase/suite.js"></script>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../codebase/suite.css">
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="form_container"></div>
        <script>            // creating dhtmlxForm
            var form = new dhx.Form("form");
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

Include source files

Create an HTML file and place full paths to JS and CSS files of the dhtmlxSuite library into the header of the file. The files are:

suite.js
suite.css

<script type="text/javascript" src="../../codebase/suite.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../codebase/suite.css">

Create a container

Add a container for the Form and give it an id, e.g. "form_container":

<div id="form_container"></div>

Define Form structure

Now you need to specify the list of Form controls. For example, you can create a form with two text fields for entering a name and an email, a checkbox for the user to give consent to data processing and a button to send a form to a server.

Thus, the structure of your form will look like this:

a Name input
an Email input
an Agree checkbox
a Send button

Form structure

To add controls inside a form, you should put them into a layout, either a vertical one (the rows attribute), or a horizontal one (the cols attribute). In the example below controls are arranged vertically, one under another:

var form_data = {
    rows:[
        {
            id: "name",
            name: "name",
            type: "input",
            label: "Name",
            icon: "dxi-magnify",
            placeholder: "John Doe"
        },
        {
            id:"email",
            name:"email", 
            type: "input",
            label: "Email",
            placeholder: "jd@mail.name"
        },
        {
            type: "checkbox",
            label: "I agree",
            name: "agree",
            labelInline: true,
            id: "agree",
            value: "checkboxvalue",
        },
        {
            type: "button",
            value: "Send",
            size: "medium",
            view: "flat",
            color: "primary"
        }
    ]
};

Initialize Form

Initialize Form with the dhx.Form object constructor. The constructor takes two parameters:

the HTML object on the page that serves as the form container.
a configuration object which (besides config options) contains an array of form controls defined as objects with a set of attributes

var form = new dhx.Form("form_container", {
    css: "dhx_widget--bordered",
    rows: [
        {
            type: "input",
            gravity: false,
            label: "Name",
            icon: "dxi dxi-magnify",
            placeholder: "John Doe",
            name: "name"
        },
        // more form controls
    ]
});

Configuration properties:

align - (string) sets the alignment of controls inside the control group
cols - (array) arranges controls inside the control group horizontally
css - (string) the name of a CSS class(es) applied to the control group
disabled - (boolean) makes a form disabled
height - (string) sets the height of the control group
padding - (string) sets padding for content inside the control group
rows - (array) arranges controls inside the control group vertically
title - (string) specifies the title of the control group
width - (string) sets the width of the control group