niceview¶

NiceView simplifies NiceGUI programming by deriving forms and tables from Pydantic or SqlModel models: the widget for each type, the layout, and validation against the model, shown inline at the field it belongs to, cross-field rules included. Persistence is a swappable adapter (a JSON file, a directory of files, SQL through SqlModel, or your own) with save, refresh, autosave and optimistic locking already wired up. The same model renders as a desktop table or as a mobile list ↔ detail drill-down.

A ModelForm rendered from a Pydantic model — text, select, toggle, number, slider, switch, multi-select chips, color and textarea widgets
_{One ModelForm.from_item(...) call, rendered from a Pydantic model.}

Installation¶

uv add git+https://github.com/clausgf/niceview          # or: pip install git+https://...
uv add "niceview[sqlmodel] @ git+https://github.com/clausgf/niceview"   # with SqlModelAdapter

SqlModelAdapter is the only component with an extra dependency (sqlmodel); everything else works with the base install. All public names are importable directly from niceview (from niceview import ModelForm, ModelGrid, ...).

Quick start¶

import pydantic
from nicegui import ui
from niceview import ModelForm

class User(pydantic.BaseModel):
    name: str = pydantic.Field(default='', max_length=50, title='Name')
    age: int = pydantic.Field(default=0, ge=0, le=150)
    active: bool = True

user = User(name='Alice', age=30)

@ui.page('/')
def main():
    ModelForm.from_item(user).render()

ui.run()

Every component follows the same create-then-render pattern: the factory returns the instance, render() draws it into the current NiceGUI context and returns the instance again — so the fluent one-liner X.from_list(...).render() always works. Unknown keyword arguments raise TypeError rather than being silently dropped.

Components at a glance¶

Component	Purpose
`ModelForm`	A Pydantic model as an editable form (fields only, no chrome)
`ModelGrid` / `ModelGridInlineEdit`	A list as a read-only or inline-editable AgGrid table
`EditGridWrapper` / `EditFormWrapper`	Grid/form plus title, description and CRUD/action buttons
Card-based list editing	One autosaving `ModelForm` per item, custom layout
`ModelList` / `DrillDownWrapper`	Mobile-first list ↔ detail drill-down navigation
`render_field` / `field_value`	One widget from one `Field()`, without a model

EditGridWrapper: a table with add, edit, delete and refresh buttons

_{EditGridWrapper — table with add / edit / delete / refresh}

DrillDownWrapper: tapping a row slides to its detail form and back

_{DrillDownWrapper — mobile list ↔ detail drill-down}

Where to go next¶

Concepts — how the chrome, field and text cascades fit together
Components — the guide: layout, actions, validation, chrome styling, the model-free render_field
Data adapters — storage backends, lenient loading, optimistic locking, reactive updates, the adapter protocols
Field types — type→widget mapping, niceview.Field() options, Meta profiles
API reference — every public class and function, generated from the source
Design decisions — what was decided against, and why

The examples are runnable: each one is a single file that starts a NiceGUI app and explains itself on its own first page.