Auto-generated UI from F# types

[ovatsus]

I don't know if this is the right place for it, but there's something I thought about doing but I won't have time for it anytime soon, so I though maybe you would like to try it. The idea would be to take something like this:

type DU = A | B | C of string | D of bool

type Record = { Prop1 : string
                Prop2 : bool
                Prop3: int
                Prop4: DU }

let myFunc (input:Record) -> ..

And have a function like this:

let generateUI (f:'Input->'Output) : Window =

That would use reflection on typeof<'Input>, generate a set of UI controls (TextBox for string, CheckBox for bool, Slider for int, GroupBox with RadioButtons for DU cases, etc...), and wire change notifications on those controls to trigger calling f, and show the results somewhere in the window in a ContentPresenter. This would work both for mathematical functions, for functions returning strings, or event for functions returning a chart from FSharp.Charting. What do you think?

We could start by doing this for WPF, and if it worked nicely we could make it work for other platforms (including web)

[ReedCopsey]

Sounds interesting - I'm always wary of "automatic edit" generators, though - the only ones I've ever found useful were ones that allowed for customization after the fact, which works well with a code generator, but don't know if it's fit for a type provider.

This is a really cool idea, though - I think it'd fit better as a separate project, since it's not really in scope for what we're doing here.

[ovatsus]

I wasn't actually thinking in a type provider, just a function that would generate stuff dynamically and return a wpf object. This would be useful for prototypes and demos, not as an initial step for doing a complete ui, so no customization

[ReedCopsey]

That might be more interesting - would potentially make more sense in https://github.com/ReedCopsey/FsXaml than here, though, as that's really UI-specific, where this is more ViewModel/under the UI oriented.