Struggling with dynamic form rendering in a Java Spring Boot application using Thymeleaf
I've been researching this but I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm working on a personal project and Recently started working with a Java Spring Boot project where I need to enhance the frontend by dynamically rendering forms based on user roles... The requirement is to show different fields for admin users compared to regular users. To implement this, I initially tried creating a simple Thymeleaf template that conditionally displays fields based on a variable passed from the controller. Here’s a snippet of what I started with: ```java @GetMapping("/form") public String showForm(Model model, Principal principal) { User user = userService.findByUsername(principal.getName()); model.addAttribute("isAdmin", user.isAdmin()); return "form"; } ``` And in the Thymeleaf template: ```html <form> <input type="text" name="username" required placeholder="Username" /> <input type="email" name="email" required placeholder="Email" /> <div th:if="${isAdmin}"> <input type="text" name="adminCode" placeholder="Admin Code" /> </div> <button type="submit">Submit</button> </form> ``` While this worked, I realized it was too rigid. I wanted to explore using JavaScript to further enhance interactivity. I considered using AJAX to fetch the form fields dynamically based on user actions but found myself stuck trying to figure out how to tie this back to my Spring backend effectively. Here’s an example of the AJAX call I tried to implement: ```javascript $(document).ready(function() { $('#userRole').change(function() { var role = $(this).val(); $.get('/form/fields?role=' + role, function(data) { $('#dynamicFields').html(data); }); }); }); ``` I wasn’t sure how to set up the controller endpoint to handle this AJAX request. Would it be appropriate to return a fragment of a Thymeleaf template? Moreover, how do I ensure that the session or user context is maintained between these requests? Searching through documentation and discussions, I noticed recommendations for using `@ResponseBody` in Spring to return JSON. I’m curious if there’s a better approach or design pattern that I might be overlooking here. Any insights on best practices for this kind of dynamic form handling in Spring Boot and Thymeleaf would be greatly appreciated! My development environment is Windows. This issue appeared after updating to Java stable. I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Java. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this.