Migrating to react-jsonschema-form@v5

Note: If you were previously using the /alpha imports to test out the scaffolder/next work, those imports have been promoted to the default exports from the respective packages. You should just have to remove the /alpha from the import path, and remove the Next from the import name. NextScaffolderPage -> ScaffolderPage, createNextScaffolderFieldExtension -> createScaffolderFieldExtension etc.

What's react-jsonschema-form?

This library is core to the frontend part of the scaffolder plugin, and is responsible for rendering the form in which developers and end users fill out to meet the jsonschema requirement for the parameters section.

Since the initial release of the scaffolder plugin, we we're on a pretty old version of react-jsonschema-form (v3), which has been pretty outdated as of late. The problem with us just bumping this library was that there are several breaking changes with the new v5 version, which we've tried pretty aggressively not to pass on to our end users for their templates and Custom Field Extensions.

We're hoping that by duplicating the types from version 3 of react-jsonschema-form and making these the types that we will support even though the underlying library is v5, it should get us through all of the breaking changes without passing that down.

What's new?

With that in mind, this release has v5 of react-jsonschema-form, and with that comes all the new features and bugfixes in v4 that we were waiting for - one of the main ones being the ability to use if / then / else syntax in the template.yaml definitions! 🎉

We've also rebuilt how validation works in the scaffolder components, which now means that we've opened the ability to have async validation functions in your Field Extensions.

Some of the pages have gotten a little bit of an overhaul in terms of UI based on some research and feedback from the community and internally.

• The TemplateList page has gotten some new Card components which show a little more information than the previous version with a little material-ui standards.
• The WizardPage has received some new updates with the stepper now running horizontally, and the Review step being a dedicated step in the stepper.
• The OngoingTask page now does not show the logs by default, and instead has a much cleaner interface for tracking the ongoing steps and the pipeline of actions that are currently showing.
  • You can also now provide your own OutputsComponent which can be used to render the outputs from an ongoing / completed task in a way that suits your templates the best. For instance, if your template produces Pull Requests, it could be useful to render these in an interactive way where you can see the statuses of each of these Pull Requests in the Ongoing Task page.

There's also a lot of bug fixes, and other things, but these are the main ones that we wanted to highlight.

How do I upgrade

With the release of v1.20.0 these changes should have been made for you. We're hoping that it should be pretty transparent, and things just work as expected. Please reach out to us on discord or in a issue if you're having issues.

It's possible that if you have a hard dependency on any of the @rjsf/* libraries in your app, you'll need to bump these manually to the version that we currently support: 5.13.6 at the time of writing. There could be breaking changes that you will have to fix here however, which we think should be pretty simple, but they're things like changing imports from @rjsf/core to @rjsf/utils.

import { FieldValidation } from '@rjsf/core';
import { FieldValidation } from '@rjsf/utils;

Escape hatch

If for some reason the upgrade to v1.20.0 didn't go as planned, there's an escape hatch for use until the next mainline release in which we will try to get any issues fixed before removing the legacy code.

We've moved some of the older exports to an /alpha export so you should be able switch to using the old library just in case.

import { ScaffolderPage } from '@backstage/plugin-scaffolder';
import { LegacyScaffolderPage } from '@backstage/plugin-scaffolder/alpha';

And this API should be the exact same as the previous Router, so you should be able to make a change like the following further down in this file:

<Route
  path="/create"
  element={
    <ScaffolderPage
    <LegacyScaffolderPage
      groups={[
        {
          title: 'Recommended',
          filter: entity =>
            entity?.metadata?.tags?.includes('recommended') ?? false,
        },
      ]}
    />
  }
>
  <ScaffolderFieldExtensions>
    <LowerCaseValuePickerFieldExtension />
    {/* ... other extensions */}
  </ScaffolderFieldExtensions>
  <ScaffolderLayouts>
    <TwoColumnLayout />
    {/* ... other layouts */}
  </ScaffolderLayouts>
</Route>

And you can also update any of your CustomFieldExtensions to use the old helper like so:

import { createScaffolderFieldExtension } from '@backstage/plugin-scaffolder';
import { createLegacyScaffolderFieldExtension } from '@backstage/plugin-scaffolder-react/alpha';

export const EntityNamePickerFieldExtension = scaffolderPlugin.provide(
  createScaffolderFieldExtension({
  createLegacyScaffolderFieldExtension({
    component: EntityNamePicker,
    name: 'EntityNamePicker',
    validation: entityNamePickerValidation,
  }),
);

And in the component themselves, you might have to do the following:

import { FieldExtensionComponentProps } from '@backstage/plugin-scaffolder-react';
import { LegacyFieldExtensionComponentProps } from '@backstage/plugin-scaffolder-react/alpha';

export const EntityNamePicker = (
  props: FieldExtensionComponentProps<string, EntityNamePickerProps>,
  props: LegacyFieldExtensionComponentProps<string, EntityNamePickerProps>,
) => {
  const {
    onChange,
    required,
    schema: { title = 'Name', description = 'Unique name of the component' },
    rawErrors,
    formData,
    idSchema,
    placeholder,
  } = props;
  // ..
};