Vue

WORK IN PROGRESS: a Vue pattern for a component to edit the properties of some object

This is never going to be finished. I do not use Vue anymore.

Usage:

<my-component value="instance" @save="onSave" @cancel="onCancel">

Minimal implementation:

<template>
   <input v-model="workingValue.prop1">
   <input v-model="workingValue.prop2">

   <button type="button" @click="cancelClicked">Cancel</button>
   <button type="button" @click="saveClicked">Save</button>
</template>

<script>
import _ from 'lodash'

export default {
  name: 'MyComponent',
  data () {
    return {
      workingValue: _.cloneDeep(this.value)
    }
  },
  props: {
    value: {
      type: Object,
      required: true
    }
  },
  methods: {
    cancelClicked () {
      this.$emit('cancel')
    },
    saveClicked () {
      if (isValid(this.workingValue)) {
        this.$emit('save', this.workingValue)
      }
    }
  }
}
</script>

It is careful not to ever modify the value passed to it. The parent expects that it can manage changes itself by using a computed property or watcher if it wants.

The component emits events to tell the parent when the user has chosen to save their changes, or cancel, but leaves it to the parent to do what it wants at that point.

Example using the component:

<template>
   <my-component
     v-if="userIsEditingObject"
     @save="onSave"
     @cancel="onCancel"
   />
 </template>

 <script>
 export default {
   methods: {
     onCancel () {
       this.userIsEditingObject = false
     },
     onSave (value) {
       this.$store.dispatch('save', value).then( () => {
           this.userIsEditingObject = false
       })
     }
 }
 </script>

Reactivity

The following applies to the store’s state, anything in a component’s data, and other things that get pulled into the reactivity system.

When an object is added to Vue’s reactivity system, Vue replaces all its properties with getters and setters under the covers, so that if you fetch the value of a property, or assign a new value to it, Vue is aware and can react. (https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/reactivity.html)

However, for technical reasons, Vue cannot detect when a property is added to or removed from an object. (https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/reactivity.html#Change-Detection-Caveats)

The implications are:

  • When updating the store, it’s fine to assign a new value to a property of the state.

  • When updating component data, it’s fine to assign a new value to a property of the component data.

  • Don’t try to use Object.assign or equivalent to update properties of objects in-place in the store???? It doesn’t seem to work.

Component properties

Vue doesn’t necessarily rebuild a component from scratch when one of its properties changes. If you’re using a property to initialize something, for example, you will need to watch that property and re-initialize when it changes that way.

However, I’m not sure even watching a property works. I’ve seen components updated when a watch on a property never triggered.

Vuex (the store)

Getters

Getters doc

Getters provide computed values based on the state. Their results are cached until the state they depend on changes.

Getters are accessed as properties not methods.

They are passed as a second arg an object with all the store’s getters, in case they want to use them.

const store = new Vuex.Store({
    ...
    getters: {
        totalCost: (state, othergetters) => {
           return some_computation_on_state
        }

// component...

computed: {
    the_total_cost () {
        return store.getters.totalCost    // No parens, not called like a method
    }
}

Mutations

Mutations doc

Mutations must be synchronous.

They cannot be called. They must be invoked using commit.

They receive a state and optional arguments, and can change the state.

When the state changes, other Vue components observing the state will update automatically.

Any value returned by a mutation is not passed back to the caller of commit.

Actions

Actions doc

Actions can contain asynchronous code. They receive a context object that has methods like commit and properties like state and getters.

Actions cannot be called. They must be invoked using dispatch.

Any value returned by an action is passed back to the caller of dispatch, by way of resolving the promise that dispatch returns to that value.

Dispatching actions always returns Promises.

Example:

const store = new Vuex.Store({
  state: {
    count: 0
  },
  mutations: {
    increment (state) {
      state.count++
    }
  },
  actions: {
    increment (context) {
        context.commit('increment')
    },
    checkout ({ commit, state }, products) {
        // save the items currently in the cart
        const savedCartItems = [...state.cart.added]
        // send out checkout request, and optimistically
        // clear the cart
        commit(types.CHECKOUT_REQUEST)
        // the shop API accepts a success callback and a failure callback
        shop.buyProducts(
          products,
          // handle success
          () => commit(types.CHECKOUT_SUCCESS),
          // handle failure
          () => commit(types.CHECKOUT_FAILURE, savedCartItems)
        )
    },
    async actionA ({ commit }) {
        commit('gotData', await getData())
    },
    async actionB ({ dispatch, commit }) {
        await dispatch('actionA') // wait for `actionA` to finish
        commit('gotOtherData', await getOtherData())
    }
  }
})

Custom components implementing v-model

Vue handles the heavy lifting when a component is included somewhere with a v-model attribute. All your component needs to do is accept a “value” property, and emit an “input” event when the value changes, with the new value.

Possibly surprising things in Vue

The Vue documentation tells you how almost everything in Vue works, but you really need to know more than that to use Vue. I like the analogy that knowing how to drive nails and saw boards doesn’t enable you to build a house, especially not a house that won’t fall down.

Here are some things I’ve discovered through experience, or that were mentioned in the documentation but I’ve found to be more important than I would have guessed.

.vue files

  • You can start your .vue file with a big multiline <!-- ...  --> comment to document it.

Templates

  • A component must end up rendering either zero or one HTML element. It may, of course, have lots of stuff nested inside. The real surprise to me was that it can render to no element at all.

  • You can use both :class and class on the same element. The resulting classes will be merged.

  • When using ‘v-if’, ‘v-else’, ‘v-else-if’ in templates, give each element using them a unique key, just as if they were using ‘v-for’.

  • “control-flow” features like ‘v-if’ and ‘v-for’ can only be used as attributes on HTML elements. But if you really don’t want an HTML element there, you can put them on the pseudo-element <template>.

  • v-model should never refer directly to things in the store, because it’ll try to change values without going through mutations. Using a computed property with a setter handles this nicely.

Note

Wouldn’t it be nice if Vue did “the right thing” in this case? But I guess it can’t know that, say, a Javscript object string is a property of something else that is reactive.

  • v-model can refer to properties inside a computed property (e.g. v-model="prop1.subprop") where prop is a computed property.

Warning

But I haven’t tested that the setter gets invoked when prop.subprop is changed, or does v-model just update the object in place. I’d guess the latter.

  • If you need to access something from a template that isn’t already part of the component’s data or methods, just import it and stick it into .data. E.g.:

    import { utilMethod } from '@/utils'
    export default {
      data () {
        return {
          a: 1,
          utilMethod
        }
      }
    }
    

    Or maybe methods would be better stuck into methods?

  • When using v-for, if there’s anything in the list you’re going to iterate over that you don’t want to include, then use a computed property, or a method, to filter the list down to just the items you do want to include, then iterate over that using v-for. (Do not try to use v-for and v-if on the same element.)

Component code

  • You can use ref to get access in component code to the DOM. Or this.$el.

  • Give every component a name. It’ll make output in the browser console more useful, and is required when nesting components recursively.

  • The vue docs make a point of saying that properties are a one-way flow of information into components.

  • To get information back out of a component, you can use:

    • events

    • the store

    • v-model

Reactivity

I get myself confused with two different things that I’m lumping together as “reactivity”:

  1. Vue “knowing” when a piece of data changes so it can take action.

  2. The actions Vue takes when it detects such changes.

It helps me to have a mental model of how Vue is implementing something like this. Here’s my mental model for reactivity. (I do not know for sure that this is accurate - I might need to set up some tests to validate these points.)

  • The way Vue can “watch” something is to set up its properties with proxy getters and setters. This is how it watches vm.data and the store’s state, for example.

  • For each property, it starts an “on change” list of things it needs to do if the property’s value changes.

  • Each time a watched property’s setter is invoked, Vue looks over its “on change” list and executes each item.

  • Vue also arranges to know when watched properties are accessed, but it doesn’t pay attention to that all the time, only during certain activities:

    • while computing a computed property

    • while rendering a component (?)

    During those times, for each watched property that is accessed, Vue adds an action to that watched property’s “on change” list to re-compute the thing it was computing when it accessed it previously.

  • Any watch property handlers are added to the corresponding “on change” list for the watched data.

    You can add properties here. E.g. if patient is part of the data, adding a watcher on patient.email will trigger when patient.email changes.

Which data does Vue “watch”?

  1. The data on a component. When a component is created, Vue sets up proxy getters and setters for each property of its data, so that if anything is assigned, Vue gets invoked and knows things have changed. It also knows when things are accessed.

    Per the page linked just above, Vue will re-render the view when any property in the components data is changed.

  2. Computed properties - at least, computed properties are included when Vue is paying attention to which watched data is being accessed. (If a computed property has a set(), that doesn’t actually do anything special, though of course it might make changes to other things that Vue is watching.)

  3. The state in the store. “Since a Vuex store’s state is made reactive by Vue, when we mutate the state, Vue components observing the state will update automatically.”

watching props - this does not seem to work? I put a ‘watch’ on a prop that was being changed, and could see the component was updating, but the watch did not trigger.

Computed properties

  • Computed properties can have getters and setters which makes them a lot more useful. A common pattern is for get() to get a value from the store and set() to update the store.

  • v-model and a computed property work very well together.

The store

  • Dispatching an action always returns a promise, whether you wrote code in the action method to do that or not. Of course, if you do return a promise, it’ll be returned to the caller. But this does mean that every time you dispatch an action, you can (and must) assume it’s going to run asynchronously and code appropriately.

  • It’s often a good idea to resist putting things into the store unless you have to. It is, essentially, a big global variable. Some reasons I think you might reasonably put things into the store:

    • you’d otherwise need to pass data as properties down into multiply nested components

    • you need to share data among components that are only distantly related

    Note that you can still model access to data in your backend by using store actions, but even then, you don’t necessarily have to save a copy of the data in the store.

What’s the advantage of using the store?

  • When you commit a change, Vue knows that part of the state has changed and can propagate that change to all the parts of the app that are depending on it. (more “reactivity”)

  • Because the dispatch interface to actions is asynchronous, if the rest of the app accesses the store via actions, then you can change to having the data in a backend and using an API to access it without having to change the rest of the app. Just update the actions to use the API instead of looking in the store. The rest of the app is already written to access things asynchronously.

More on reactivity

“watching” things

I didn’t notice right away that the “watch” feature of Vue components is cleverly defined so that you can only watch properties of your component – it is not a general-purpose “watch anything for changes” function. So you can watch data, or computed properties. And that’s about it, right? ANSWER THIS QUESTION.