FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

I'm looking to use NL Design System with my $framework of choice, can I do that?

We see that a number of organizations are implementing their re-usable components as part of adapting NL Design System, and it's a logical desire to be able to re-use those components with Open Forms. Unfortunately, this is not easily done. Open Forms builds on top of Formio.js, which has their own component system independent from any existing libraries or frameworks such as React, Angular, Vue.js, Ember.js...

Formio.js has a lot of features, and implementing all of these in React components would be a daunting task. Ultimately, vanilla Formio.js is build on top of Embedded JS templates (from the lodash library, it seems) which is a very different approach from popular libraries/frameworks. Markup (the actual HTML), UX and styling are far more decoupled in Formio.js than, say, React where components are rather the units combining those three.

If you really want to explore this, it is probably technically possible and the custom components example is probably the best step. Note that if you defer the rendering to React, you would still have to come up with a way to emit all the relevant Formio.js events back to the parent component(s).

From this short analysis, it seems that this is a large amount of work with limited benefits.