Effortless ways to Persist Form Data in React Applications using react-hook-form-persist

Imagine filling out a long form, only to accidentally refresh the page and lose all your data. Frustrating, right? For developers, ensuring form persistence across sessions can be tricky especially in complex applications.

Fortunately, if you’re using react-hook-form in your React app, there’s a quick and efficient solution to this problem: react-hook-form-persist. This lightweight utility makes it simple to save form data automatically to local storage, so users can pick up where they left off without re-entering everything. With minimal setup and just a single line of code, react-hook-form-persist makes adding form persistence a breeze.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to integrate react-hook-form-persist into your project, ensuring users never lose progress again.

Why choose react-hook-form-persist?

React form persistence can significantly enhance the user experience, especially for longer forms. However, manually managing this state can add complexity and bloat to your code. react-hook-form-persist is specifically designed to work with react-hook-form and provides these benefits:

• Automatic persistence: Tracks form field values and saves them to local storage without requiring you to write custom logic.

• Simple setup: Only requires one additional hook after initializing useForm.

• Flexible storage key: Allows you to specify an unique key to avoid conflicts with other data in local storage.

Step-by-Step guide to using react-hook-form-persist

Here’s how to get started with react-hook-form-persist in your React project.

Step 1: Install react-hook-form and react-hook-form-persist

If you haven’t installed react-hook-form or react-hook-form-persist yet, you can add them to your project via npm:

Step 2: Import and Initialize useForm

First, import useForm from react-hook-form to initialize your form. Here, we’ll set up a simple form with some default values:

Step 3: Set up useFormPersist

The useFormPersist hook takes two arguments:

• A storage key (my-form-key here), which names the storage entry and helps you keep your form data unique.

• An object containing watch and setValue from useForm to track and update the form fields as the user interacts with them.

Once added, useFormPersist will automatically save each form field’s value in local storage as it changes. If the user reloads the page, the form will repopulate with saved data, providing a seamless experience.

Step 4: Customize form fields and register inputs

react-hook-form makes it easy to add multiple form fields. Each field registered with register is automatically watched by react-hook-form-persist, so data is saved as users type.

These fields will persist across sessions, making it easy for users to resume filling out their information where they left off.

Step 5: Handle form submission

When the form is submitted, you can process the data as needed and optionally clear the stored form data if you want the form to reset after submission.

This reset() function will clear both the form fields and the persisted data from local storage, giving you control over when to keep or discard saved form data.

Benefits of using react-hook-form-persist

Here are some key advantages of adding this utility to your project:

1. User-Friendly Experience: Users can leave the page and return without losing progress.

2. Lightweight and Efficient: Just one line of code and no complex state management is required.

3. Easy Integration with react-hook-form: Works seamlessly with react-hook-form’s methods for watching and setting values.

4. Customizable Storage Keys: Helps avoid conflicts in local storage, especially when using multiple forms.

Conclusion

Implementing form persistence can be a powerful feature in user-centric applications, especially when long forms are involved. react-hook-form-persist is a simple, yet effective solution for adding this functionality to your React project. With just a few lines of code, you can ensure that users won’t lose their progress if they leave the page or refresh the browser.

Whether you’re building a survey, checkout form, or registration page, using react-hook-form-persist with react-hook-form can enhance your app’s usability and keep your users happy.

Start integrating react-hook-form-persist today and see how it transforms your forms!

Have any questions or need help? Drop a comment below. We’d love to hear your thoughts!