ui-safe-form-patterns

name	ui-safe-form-patterns
description	Implement or refactor UI forms with defense-in-depth validation, safe input handling, reliable submission behavior, and privacy-aware error handling. Use when building login, registration, profile, payment, admin, or file-upload forms.

UI Safe Form Patterns

Use this skill to build forms that are both secure and dependable in real user conditions.

When to use

• Creating new forms or refactoring existing form logic.
• Hardening forms that process credentials, PII, money, or privileged actions.
• Fixing flaky submission flows and duplicate-submit bugs.

Reliability and safety baseline

• Validate on both client and server.
• Treat client validation as UX, not security control.
• Normalize input before validation when format ambiguity is common.
• Prevent duplicate submissions with in-flight state and idempotent APIs.
• Use clear loading, success, retry, and failure states.
• Never leak secrets or raw backend traces in UI errors.

Implementation workflow

1. Define schema and constraints per field, including max lengths and allowed character sets.
2. Build controlled input handling with immediate low-cost validation and deferred heavy checks.
3. Sanitize or encode displayed user-provided content in previews and confirmation screens.
4. Add submit lock, timeout handling, and cancel or retry behavior where relevant.
5. Map backend errors into safe user-facing messages without exposing internals.
6. Add tests for invalid input, race conditions, and repeated clicks.

Sensitive field rules

• Password fields: enforce minimum policy and avoid logging or analytics capture.
• Email and phone: normalize before validation to reduce false negatives.
• File uploads: enforce MIME and size checks client-side and server-side.
• Rich text inputs: sanitize on server and encode on render.
• Numeric money fields: use decimal-safe parsing and range checks.

Suggested checks

rg -n "onSubmit|handleSubmit|Form|formik|react-hook-form|yup|zod" frontend/src
rg -n "localStorage|sessionStorage|console\.log\(|Sentry|analytics" frontend/src
rg -n "type=\"file\"|upload|multipart|FormData" frontend/src

Test minimum

• Reject malformed input with stable messaging.
• Ignore rapid double click while request is in flight.
• Preserve user input when recoverable errors occur.
• Avoid stale success state after failed retries.
• Confirm no sensitive values appear in logs or telemetry payloads.