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Unstyled Form Control

The Unstyled Form Control component is a utility that lets you associate a form input with auxiliary components, such as labels, error indicators, or helper text.

Introduction

Unstyled Form Control is a utility that wraps an input component with other associated components in order to make the state of the input available to those components.

For instance, you may want to show an additional element asking the user to enter a value if the input is empty, or display a warning icon if the entered value is incorrect.

Component

Usage

After installation, you can start building with this component using the following basic elements:

import FormControlUnstyled from '@mui/base/FormControlUnstyled';

export default function MyApp() {
  return (
    <FormControlUnstyled>
      {/* <input> and/or other contents of the form */}
    </FormControlUnstyled>
  );
}

Basics

Unstyled Form Control wraps around the elements of a form that need access to the state of an <input>. For instance, if the form's Submit button needs to change states after the user enters information, then the component will be structured like this:

<FormControlUnstyled>
  <input>
  <button>Submit</button>
</FormControlUnstyled>

The following demo shows how to create and style a form that uses Unstyled Form Control to wrap the elements of the form. Note that it also uses the useFormControlUnstyledContext hook in order to pass props to the custom Unstyled Input—see the Hook section below for more details.

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Hook

import { useFormControlUnstyledContext } from '@mui/base/FormControlUnstyled';

The useFormControlUnstyledContext hook reads the context provided by Unstyled Form Control. This hook lets you work with custom input components inside of the Form Control. You can also use it to read the form control's state and react to its changes in a custom component.

Hooks do not support slot props, but they do support customization props.

The demo below shows how to integrate this hook with its component counterpart:

  • CustomInput is a wrapper around a native HTML <input> that adds Form Control integration.
  • ControlStateDisplay reads the state of the form control and displays it as text.

empty | not focused

Note that even though Form Control supports both controlled and uncontrolled-style APIs (i.e. it accepts value and defaultValue props), useFormControlUnstyledContext returns only the controlled value. This way, you don't have to implement both in your custom input—Unstyled Form Control does this for you.

useFormControlUnstyledContext returns an object with the following fields:

Name Type Description
disabled boolean Represents the value of the FormControlUnstyled's disabled prop.
error boolean Represents the value of the Unstyled Form Control component's error prop. Note that it is not calculated automatically (i.e. it's not set when required: true and value: '').
filled boolean Set to true if value is not empty.
focused boolean Set to true if the wrapped input has received focus.
required boolean Represents the value of the Unstyled Form Control component's required prop.
value unknown The current value of the form control.

The following callbacks are also part of the returned object—they are meant to be used when creating custom inputs:

Name Type Description
onChange React.ChangeEvent => void Value change handler. Should be forwarded to the inner input.
onBlur () => void Focus change handler. Should be forwarded to the inner input.
onFocus () => void Focus change handler. Should be forwarded to the inner input.

Customization

Accessing the form control state

You can access the state of the form control by providing a function as a child of the Form Control. The state will be provided as a parameter to this function.

The following demo shows how to access the state of the form control in an Unstyled Input component nested inside of the Form Control:

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API

See the documentation below for a complete reference to all of the props and classes available to the components mentioned here.