Alfred Form Generator

The application afg is used to generate Swift code from a specification. The generated Swift code is a standalone application that presents the user with a form to provide answers that can then be parsed by Alfred and take appropriate actions.

The application prints the entered values to STDOUT as tab separated key value pairs.

Usage

Alfred Form Generator

Usage: afg [OPTIONS] --field <field> <title>

Arguments:
  <title>  Specify the dialog title

Options:
      --separator <field_separator>  Specify the field separator [default: @]
      --field-height <INT>           Specify the field height [default: 35]
      --window-width <INT>           Specify the width of the window [default: 400]
  -f, --field <field>                Describes details of a field. Can be repeated multiple times.
  -h, --help                         Print help
  -V, --version                      Print version

This application is used to generate a swift application that can be run in Alfred as a form input

Specification

The specification should at least specify the title and at least one form field.

The title is a free format title that should specify the goal of the form.

The field's specify the user interface components, from top to bottom in the order as specified on the command line.

Field

The form field option has 4 or 5 fields depending on the type of field.

Element	Description
type	The type of form field. Possible values are "string", "bool" "radio" and "picker". This part is case insensitive.
name	The name of the form field. The name is used to return the value.
default	The default value. This value can be empty, but should still be specified without a value. In the case of a radio button this field can contain multiple comma separated values.
decoration	The annotation (description) of the field in the form.
choices	The possible values of the picker or radio button.

An example of the field specification is as follows:

--field type=String@name=title@default=example@decoration="The Title"

The keys are case insensitive. The default separator is @ and can be overruled with the option --separator.

An example

A full example could be as follows:

afg \
	--field type=String@name=title@default=example@decoration="The Title" \
	--field type=String@name=subtitle@default=@decoration="The Subtitle" \
	--field type=Bool@name=enabled@default=true@decoration="Enable secret" \
	--field type=Picker@name=choice@default=0@decoration="Make your choice"@choices="Choice A,Choice B,Choice C" \
	--field type=Radio@name=radio@default=1,John@decoration="The recipients"@choices="John,Chris,Joe" \
	--field type=Picker@name=choice2@default=2@decoration="Make another choice"@choices="Choice X,Choice Y,Choice Z" \
	--window-width 500 \
	"The example title"	

The window looks as follows:

An example output of the above command is:

title=example	subtitle=my subtitle	enabled=true	choice=Choice A	radio=Chris,John	choice2=Choice Z```

Note that the output line has no newline and each field is tab separated.

when the dialog is cancelled, the output is the word "canceled".

Install

To install afg take the following steps:

1. You must install Swift on your system. See https://www.swift.org/install/macos/. Swift is used to generate the form that presents your questions.

2. You now have the option to either install a pre-compiled binary or compile the binary yourself:

   Install a pre-compiled binary

   The latest binary can be found here: https://github.com/fappelman/afg/releases/download/v0.9.2/afg.dmg

   Compile it yourself

   1. This application is built in Rust. The instructions to install Rust can be found here: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install and it boils down to running the following command in the terminal:

      curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

   2. Download and install this project using the following steps in the terminal:

      cd
      mkdir temp
      git clone https://github.com/fappelman/afg.git
      cd afg
      PATH=$PATH:~/.cargo/bin
      cargo install --path .

      after these steps, the afg application will be installed in ~/.cargo/bin.

Using in Alfred

A typical flow is the following:

where the script contains the afg command. The "Canceled/Proceed" box is defined as follows:

and the final box will simply split the output of afg into variables.

Credits

The original idea to use Swift code to generate a UI is coming from Patrick Sy GUI Input Experiment

The templates that is being used is based on the original work of Patrick.

The main difference is that the code from Patrick was static, did not have default keys and did not support radio buttons.