TodoMVC Tutorial Part II
Prerequisites
{ Familarity with the TodoMVC tutorial Part I }
The Goals of this Tutorial
In this tutorial, will investigate the advanced concepts of
prerendering,
the
while_loading
method andoptimizing ActiveRecord scopes to run on the client.
None of the techniques are necessary to build large complex applications, but they are useful to know to build the possible user experience.
Skills required
Basic knowledge of Rails is helpful, and ability to follow the basic TodoMVC example on which this is based.
Chapter 1: Setting Things Up
You can just read this tutorial, or if you want to follow along clone the working Todo application from this directory ... (or do we want to use the rail's template mechanism)
Once setup you should be able to start the rails app and hot reloader by running:
bundle exec foreman start
visit
localhost:5000
Add about 4-6 random Todo's and mark about half as completed.
Chapter 2: Prerendering
When you first load the Todo app you will see a brief flash between the first load, and complete display of the list of Todos.
What is going on?
When you first load a Hyperstack application, you get all the code compiled in to Javascript, along with instructions to React on how to mount your top level component.
In our case the Todo App is mounted, which will then render the list of the Todo's. The list of Todo's are still on the server, so once the App is mounted and rendered we then have to wait a few 100 milliseconds for the actual data to arrive from the server.
These steps - starting Hyperstack, rendering the application, waiting for data, and re-rendering takes enough time and is visually noticeable as a brief flicker. On larger apps the download time of the Hyperstack will also be noticable.
The solution is called pre-rerendering. Prerendering runs all the steps before the page is delivered on the server. The result is that the page comes down already rendered in its final state. After page is loaded all the event handlers are then attached so that the page's components can continue to be updated reactively.
To turn on prerendering you change the Hyperstack configuration in the initializer from prerendering = :off
to :on
Restart the server and prerendering is enabled.
Hypestack comes configured with prerendering off, because javsacript errors during prerendering occur on the server within the headless javscript environment and are thus much harder to debug. Once the application is working properly its easy to turn prerendering on.
A Rails ActiveRecord Model is a Ruby class that is backed by a database table. In this example we will have one model class called
Todo
. When manipulating models, Rails automatically generates the necessary SQL code for you. So whenTodo.all
is evaluated Rails generates the appropriate SQL and turns the result of the query into appropriate Ruby data structures.
Hyperstack Models are extensions of ActiveRecord Models that synchronize the data between the client and server automatically for you. So now Todo.all
can be evaluated on the server or the client.
Okay lets see it in action:
Add the Todo Model:
In your second terminal window run on a single line:
This runs a Rails generator which will create the skeleton Todo model class, and create a migration which will add the necessary tables and columns to the database.
VERY IMPORTANT! Now look in the db/migrate/ directory, and edit the migration file you have just created. The file will be titled with a long string of numbers then "create_todos" at the end. Change the line creating the completed boolean field so that it looks like this:
For details on 'why' see this blog post. Basically this insures
completed
is treated as a true boolean, and will avoid having to check betweenfalse
andnull
later on.Now run
which will create the table.
Make Your Model Public:
Move
models/todo.rb
tohyperstack/models
This will make the model accessible on the clients and the server, subject to any data access policies.
Note: The hyperstack installer adds a policy that gives full permission to all clients but only in development and test modes. Have a look at
app/policies/application_policy
if you are interested.Try It
Now change your
App
component's render method to:You will now see Number of Todos: 0 displayed.
Now start a rails console
and type:
This will create a new Todo in the server's database, which will cause your Hyperstack application to be updated and you will see the count change to 1!
Try it again:
and you will see the count change to 2!
Are we having fun yet? I hope so! As you can see Hyperstack is synchronizing the Todo model between the client and server. As the state of the database changes, Hyperstack buzzes around updating whatever parts of the DOM were dependent on that data (in this case the count of Todos).
Notice that we did not create any APIs to achieve this. Data on the server is synchronized with data on the client for you.
Chapter 3: Creating the Top Level App Structure
Now that we have all of our pieces in place, lets build our application.
Replace the entire contents of app.rb
with:
After saving you will see the following error displayed:
Uncaught error: Header: undefined method `Header' for # in App (created by Hyperstack::Internal::Component::TopLevelRailsComponent) in Hyperstack::Internal::Component::TopLevelRailsComponent
because have not defined the three subcomponents. Lets define them now:
Add three new ruby files to the app/hyperstack/components
folder:
Once you add the Footer component you should see:
Header will go here List of Todos will go here Footer will go here </div> If you don't, restart the server, and reload the browser.
Notice how the usual HTML tags such as DIV, SECTION, and HEADER are all available as well as all the other HTML and SVG tags.
Hyperstack uses the following conventions to easily distinguish between HTML tags, application defined components and other helper methods:
HTML tags are in all caps
Application components are CamelCased
other helper methods are snake_cased
Chapter 4: Listing the Todos, Hyperstack Params, and Prerendering
To display each Todo we will create a TodoItem component that takes a parameter:
We can use this component in our Index component:
Now you will see something like
Header will go here Footer will go here </div>
As you can see components can take parameters (or props in react.js terminology.)
Rails uses the terminology params (short for parameters) which have a similar purpose to React props, so to make the transition more natural for Rails programmers Hyperstack uses params, rather than props.
Params are declared using the param
macro and are accessed via Ruby instance variables. Notice that the instance variable name is CamelCased so that it is easily distinguished from other instance variables.
Our Index
component mounts a new TodoItem
with each Todo
record and passes the Todo
to the TodoItem
component as the parameter.
Now go back to Rails console and type
and you will see the last Todo in the list changing.
Try adding another Todo using create
like you did before. You will see the new Todo is added to the list.
Chapter 5: Adding Inputs to Components
So far we have seen how our components are synchronized to the data that they display. Next let's add the ability for the component to change the underlying data.
First add an INPUT
html tag to your TodoItem component like this:
You will notice that while it does display the checkboxes, you can not change them by clicking on them.
For now we can change them via the console like we did before. Try executing
and you should see the last Todo's completed
checkbox changing state.
To make our checkbox input change its own state, we will add an event handler
for the change event:
It reads like a good novel doesn't it? On the change
event update the todo, setting the completed attribute to the opposite of its current value. The rest of coordination between the database and the display is taken care of for you by the Hyperstack.
After saving your changes you should be able change the completed
state of each Todo, and check on the rails console (say by checking Todo.last.completed
) and you will see that the value has been persisted to the database. You can also demonstrate this by refreshing the page.
We will finish up by adding a delete link at the end of the Todo item:
Note: If a component or tag block returns a string it is automatically wrapped in a SPAN, to insert a string in the middle you have to wrap it a SPAN like we did above.
I hope you are starting to see a pattern here. Hyperstack components determine what to display based on the state
of some objects. External events, such as mouse clicks, the arrival of new data from the server, and even timers update the state
. Hyperstack recomputes whatever portion of the display depends on the state
so that the display is always in sync with the state
. In our case the objects are the Todo model and its associated records, which have a number of associated internal states
.
By the way, you don't have to use Models to have states. We will see later that states can be as simple as boolean instance variables.
Chapter 6: Routing
Now that Todos can be completed or active, we would like our user to be able display either "all" Todos, only "completed" Todos, or "active" (or incomplete) Todos. We want our URL to reflect which filter is currently being displayed. So /all
will display all todos, /completed
will display the completed Todos, and of course /active
will display only active (or incomplete) Todos. We would also like the root url /
to be treated as /all
To achieve this we first need to be able to scope (or filter) the Todo Model. So let's edit the Todo model file so it looks like this:
Now we can say Todo.all
, Todo.completed
, and Todo.active
, and get the desired subset of Todos. You might want to try it now in the rails console. Note: you will have to do a reload!
to load the changes to the Model.
We would like the URL of our App to reflect which of these filters is being displayed. So if we load
/all
we want the Todo.all scope to be run;/completed
we want the Todo.completed scope to be run;/active
we want the Todo.active scope to be run;/
(by itself) then we should redirect to/all
.
Having the application display different data (or whole different components) based on the URL is called routing.
Lets change App
to look like this:
and the Index
component to look like this:
Lets walk through the changes:
We mount the
Header
components as before.We then check to see if the current route exactly matches
/
and if it does, redirect to/all
.Then instead of directly mounting the
Index
component, we route to it based on the URL. In this case if the url must look like/xxx
.Index
now includes (mixes-in) theHyperstack::Router::Helpers
module which has methods likematch
.Instead of simply enumerating all the Todos, we decide which scope to filter using the URL fragment matched by
:scope
.
Notice the relationship between Route('/:scope', mounts: Index)
and match.params[:scope]
:
During routing each Route
is checked. If it matches then the indicated component is mounted, and the match parameters are saved for that component to use.
You should now be able to change the url from /all
, to /completed
, to /active
, and see a different set of Todos. For example if you are displaying the /active
Todos, you will only see the Todos that are not complete. If you check one of these it will disappear from the list.
Rails also has the concept of routing, so how do the Rails and Hyperstack routers interact? Have a look at the config/routes.rb file. You will see a line like this:
get '/(*other)', to: 'hyperstack#app'
This is telling Rails to accept all requests and to process them using theHyperstack
controller, which will attempt to mount a component namedApp
in response to the request. The mounted App component is then responsible for further processing the URL.For more complex scenarios Hyperstack provides Rails helper methods that can be used to mount components from your controllers, layouts, and views.
Chapter 7: Helper Methods, Inline Styling, Active Support and Router Nav Links
Of course we will want to add navigation to move between these routes. We will put the navigation in the footer:
Save the file, and you will now have 3 links, that you will change the path between the three options.
Here is how the changes work:
Hyperstack is just Ruby, so you are free to use all of Ruby's rich feature set to structure your code. For example the
link_item
method is just a helper method to save us some typing.The
link_item
method uses thepath
argument to construct an HTML Anchor tag.Hyperstack comes with a large portion of the Rails active-support library. For the text of the anchor tag we use the active-support method
camelize
.Later we will add proper css classes, but for now we use an inline style. Notice that the css
margin-right
is writtenmarginRight
, and that10px
can be expressed as the integer 10.
Notice that as you click each link the page reloads. However what we really want is for the links to simply change the route, without reloading the page.
To make this happen we will mixin some router helpers by including HyperRouter::ComponentMethods
inside of class.
Then we can replace the anchor tag with the Router's NavLink
component:
Change
to
Our component should now look like this:
After this change you will notice that changing routes does not reload the page, and after clicking to different routes, you can use the browsers forward and back buttons.
How does it work? The NavLink
component reacts to a click just like an anchor tag, but instead of changing the window's URL directly, it updates the HTML5 history object. Associated with this history is (hope you guessed it) state. So when the history changes it causes any components depending on the state of the URL to be re-rendered.
Chapter 8: Create a Basic EditItem Component
So far we can mark Todos as completed, delete them, and filter them. Now we create an EditItem
component so we can change the Todo title.
Add a new component like this:
Before we use this component let's understand how it works.
It receives a
todo
param which will be edited by the user;The
title
of the todo is displayed as the initial value of the input;When the user types the enter key updated.
Now update the TodoItem
component replacing
with
Try it out by changing the text of some our your Todos followed by the enter key. Then refresh the page to see that the Todos have changed.
Chapter 9: Adding State to a Component, Defining Custom Events, and a Lifecycle Callback.
This all works, but its hard to use. There is no feed back indicating that a Todo has been saved, and there is no way to cancel after starting to edit. We can make the user interface much nicer by adding state (there is that word again) to the TodoItem
. We will call our state editing
. If editing
is true, then we will display the title in a EditItem
component, otherwise we will display it in a LABEL
tag. The user will change the state to editing
by double clicking on the label. When the user saves the Todo, we will change the state of editing
back to false. Finally we will let the user cancel the edit by moving the focus away (the blur
event) from the EditItem
. To summarize:
User double clicks on any Todo title: editing changes to
true
.User saves the Todo being edited: editing changes to
false
.User changes focus away (
blur
) from the Todo being edited: editing changes tofalse
.
In order to accomplish this our EditItem
component is going to communicate to its parent via two application defined events - save
and cancel
.
Add the following 5 lines to the EditItem
component like this:
The first two new lines add our custom events.
The next new line uses one of several Lifecycle Callbacks. In this case we need to move the focus to the EditItem
component after is mounted. The DOM
class is Hyperstack's jQuery wrapper, and dom_node
is the method that returns the actual dom node where this instance of the component is mounted.
The save!
line will trigger the save event in the parent component. Notice that the method to trigger a custom event is the name of the event followed by a bang (!).
Finally we add the blur
event handler and trigger our cancel
event.
Now we can update our TodoItem
component to be a little state machine, which will react to three events: double_click
, save
and cancel
.
All states in Hyperstack are simply Ruby instance variables (ivars). Here we use the @editing
ivar.
We have already used a lot of states that are built into the HyperModel and HyperRouter. The state machines in these complex objects are built out collections of instance variables like @editing
.
In the TodoItem
component the value of @editing ...
controls whether to render the EditItem
or the INPUT, LABEL, and Anchor tags.
Because @editing
(like all ivars) starts off as nil, when the TodoItem
first mounts, it renders the INPUT, LABEL, and Anchor tags. Attached to the label tag is a double_click
handler which does one thing: mutates the component's state setting @editing
to true. This then causes the component to re-render, and now instead of the three tags, we will render the EditItem
component.
Attached to the EditItem
component is the save
and cancel
handler (which is shared between the two events) that mutates the component's state, setting @editing
back to false.
Using and changing state in a component is a simple as reading or changing the value of some instance variables. The only caveat is that whenever you want to change a state variable whether its a simple assignment or changing the internal value of a complex structure like a hash or array you use the mutate
method to signal Hyperstack that that state is changing.
Chapter 10: Using EditItem to create new Todos
Our EditItem
component has a good robust interface. It takes a Todo, and lets the user edit the title, and then either save or cancel, using two custom events to communicate back outwards.
Because of this we can easily reuse EditItem
to create new Todos. Not only does this save us time, but it also insures that the user interface acts consistently.
Update the Header
component to use EditItem
like this:
What we have done is initialize an instance variable @new_todo
to a new unsaved Todo
item in the before_mount
lifecycle method.
Then we pass the value @new_todo
to EditItem, and when it is saved, we generate another new Todo and save it in the new_todo
state variable.
When Header
's state is mutated, it will cause a re-render of the Header, which will then pass the new value of @new_todo
, to EditItem
, causing that component to also re-render.
We don't care if the user cancels the edit, so we simply don't provide a :cancel
event handler.
Once the code is added a new input box will appear at the top of the window, and when you type enter a new Todo will be added to the list.
However you will notice that the value of new Todo input box does not clear. This is subtle problem but it's easy to fix.
React treats the INPUT
tag's defaultValue
specially. It is only read when the INPUT
is first mounted, so it does not react to changes like normal parameters. Our Header
component does pass in new Todo records, but even though they are changing React does not update the INPUT.
React has a special param called key
. React uses this to uniquely identify mounted components. It is used to keep track of lists of components, it can also used in this case to indicate that the component needs to be remounted by changing the value of key.
All objects in Hyperstack respond to the to_key
method which will return a suitable unique key id, so all we have to pass @Todo
as the key param it this will insure that as @Todo
changes, we will re-initialize the INPUT
tag.
Chapter 11: Adding Styling
We are just going to steal the style sheet from the benchmark Todo app, and add it to our assets.
Go grab the file in this repo here: https://github.com/hyperstack-org/hyperstack/blob/edge/docs/tutorial/assets/todo.css and copy it to a new file called todo.css
in the app/assets/stylesheets/
directory.
You will have to refresh the page after changing the style sheet.
Now its a matter of updating the css classes which are passed to components via the class
parameter.
Let's start with the App
component. With styling it will look like this:
The Footer
components needs have a UL
added to hold the links nicely, and we can also use the NavLinks
active_class
param to highlight the link that is currently active:
For the Index component just add the main
and todo-list
classes.
For the EditItem component we want the parent to pass any html parameters such as class
along to the INPUT tag. We do this by adding the special others
param that will collect any extra params, we then pass it along in to the INPUT tag. Hyperstack will take care of merging all the params together sensibly.
Now we can add classes to the TodoItem's list-item, input, anchor tags, and to the EditItem
component:
In the Header we can send a different class to the EditItem
component. While we are at it we will add the H1 { 'todos' }
hero unit.
At this point your Todo App should be properly styled.
Chapter 12: Other Features
Show How Many Items Left In Footer This is just a span that we add before the link tags list in the Footer component:
Add 'placeholder' Text To Edit Item EditItem should display a meaningful placeholder hint if the title is blank:
Don't Show the Footer If There are No Todos In the
App
component add a guard so that we won't show the Footer if there are no Todos:
Congratulations! you have completed the tutorial.
Summary
You have built a small but feature rich full stack Todo application in less than 100 lines of code:
The complete application is shown here:
General troubleshooting
1: Wait. On initial boot it can take several minutes to pre-compile all the system assets.
2: Make sure to save (or better yet do a git commit) after every instruction so that you can backtrack
3: Its possible to get things so messed up the hot-reloader will not work. Restart the server and reload the browser.
4: Reach out to us on Gitter, we are always happy to help get you onboarded!
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