Vue component state freezing when moved between router-views - vue.js

I have a custom map component, which wraps a Openlayers 4 instance. This component which I am forced to use, is used multiple places across my SPA. The initialization process is quite long, so I would like to keep one instance of the map available, and move it between views when I need to. Problem is that the state doesen´t update within the component when it has moved.
I´ve boiled the problem down to this fiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/j16d4yto/
When moved on the same router-view the state updates fine (click the ‘Change text’ button). But when the router-view changes, and the component is moved with appendChild to the new div, the state freezes, and you can´t update the text variable anymore.
This is how I move the component from one element to another:
this.$root.$on('showMoveableComponent', function(element) {
element.appendChild(thisElement);
this.text = 'Changed text2';
});
I bet I am doing something wrong here, and probably also approaching this problem in the wrong way?
Thanks!

It's not working because of when router-view changed your MoveableComponent has been destroyed only its DOM element still referenced by you. You can test by print something in destroyed lifecycle callback function.
So this mean you can solve this by using built-in keep-alive component:
<keep-alive>
<router-view></router-view>
</keep-alive>
Example
The keep-alive component will cache everything which may not good in some other cases.
In my opinion the better way to solve this is create another Vue instance and move it.
const MoveableComponent = new Vue({
el: '#some-id',
template: `...`,
data: { ... },
methods: {
changeText() {
...
},
moveTo(element) {
element.appendChild(this.$el)
}
}
})
Example

Related

Why aren't there props for child -> parent and $emits for parent -> child?

I have a page with a component and the page needs to access a variable in that component. Would be nice if it were reactive. Then from the page I need to activate a function in the component. Would be nice if it could be done without a reactive variable. My question is 1: what's the best way to activate the function from the parent, for example when I click a button and 2: it seems very unintuitive and random to me that they aren't both possible in both directions? Anyone maybe know how Vue suggest you do it? This whole thing seems so complex relative to the relatively simple thing I'm trying to do.
I guess I try to use props? Or are refs a better option here?
So in general: you use refs, if you need the dom element, that's the whole purpose of refs. Since you don't mention that you n ed the dom element, you don't need to use that here.
There are 3 ways of communication: parent to child via props: https://vuejs.org/guide/components/props.html
child to parent via events
https://vuejs.org/guide/components/events.html
and anyone to anyone via event bus, which need an extra lib in vue3 and is out of scope for your question
https://v3-migration.vuejs.org/breaking-changes/events-api.html#event-bus
If you want to execute a function in the component whenever the value changes, you can put a watcher on the prop.
The other way around, from child to parent, you just create a listener to your emitted event and invoke a function of your choice. There are good examples in the docs in my opinion.
As per my understanding, You want to trigger the child component method from the Parent component without passing any prop as a input parameter and in same way you want to access child component data in the parent component without $emit. If Yes, You can simply achieve this using $refs.
You can attach the ref to the child component and then access it's variables and methods with the help of this $refs.
Live Demo (Just for a demo purpose I am using Vue 2, You can make the changes as per Vue 3) :
Vue.component('child', {
data: {
childVar: ''
},
methods: {
triggerEventInChildFromParent() {
console.log('Child Function triggered from Parent');
}
},
mounted() {
this.childVar = 'Child component variable'
}
});
var app = new Vue({
el: '#app',
methods: {
triggerEventInChild() {
this.$refs.child.triggerEventInChildFromParent()
}
},
mounted() {
console.log(this.$refs.child.childVar)
}
});
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/vue/2.5.17/vue.js"></script>
<div id="app">
<button #click="triggerEventInChild">
Button in Parent
</button>
<child ref="child"></child>
</div>

Vue3 child component does not recreating, why?

I have made some sandbox code of my problem here:
https://codesandbox.io/s/clever-zeh-kdff1z
<template>
<div v-if="started">
<HelloWorld :msg="msg" #exit="exit" #remake="remake" />
</div>
<button v-if="!started" #click="started = !started">start</button>
</template>
<script>
import HelloWorldVue from "./components/HelloWorld.vue";
export default {
name: "App",
components: {
HelloWorld: HelloWorldVue,
},
data() {
return {
started: false,
msg: "Hello Vue 3 in CodeSandbox!",
};
},
methods: {
exit() {
this.started = false;
},
remake() {
this.msg = this.msg + 1;
//this code should recreate our child but...
this.exit();
this.started = true;
// setTimeout(() => {
// this.started = true;
// });
},
},
};
</script>
So! We have 2 components parent and child. The idea is simple - we have a flag variable in our parent. We have a v-if statement for this - hide / show an element depend on the flag value "false" or "true". After we toggle the flag - the child component should be recreated. This is the idea. Simple.
In our parent we have a button which will set the flag variable to "true" and our child will be created and will appear on our page.
Ok. Now we have 2 buttons inside our child.
One button is "exit" which is emit an event so the flag variable of parent will set to "false" and the elemint will disappear from our page(It will be destroyed btw). Works as charm. Ok.
The second button "remake". It emit event so the flag variable will be just toggled (off then on). Simple. We set to "false", we set to "true". So the current child should dissapear, and then imediatly will be created new one.
But here we are facing the problem! Ok, current child is still here, there is no any recreation, it just updates current one... So in child I have checked our lifecycle hooks - created and unmounted via console.log function. And the second button dont trigger them. Start->Exit->Start != Start->Remake.
So can anyone please explain me why this is happening? I cant figure it out.
Interesting thing, if you can see there is some asynchronous code commented in my demo. If we set our flag to "true" inside the async function the child will be recreated and we will see the created hook message but it seems like crutch. We also can add a :key to our component and update it to force rerender, but it also seems like a crutch.
Any explanations on this topic how things work would be nice.
Vue re-uses elements and components whenever it can. It will also only rerender once per tick. The length of a 'tick' is not something you should worry yourself about too much, other than that it exists. In your case the this.exit() and this.started = true statements are executed within the same tick. The data stored in this.started is both true in the last tick and the current tick as it does not end the tick in between the statements, and so nothing happens to your component.
In general you should think in states in Vue rather than in lifecycles. Or in other words: What are the different situations this component must be able to handle and how do you switch between those states. Rather than determining what to do in which point in time. Using :key="keyName" is indeed generally a crutch, as is using import { nextTick } from 'vue'; and using that to get some cadence of states to happen, as is using a setTimeout to get some code to execute after the current tick. The nasty part of setTimeout is also that it can execute code on a component that is already destroyed. It can sometimes help with animations though.
In my experience when people try to use lifecycle hooks they would rather have something happen when one of the props change. For example when a prop id on the child component changes you want to load data from the api to populate some fields. To get this to work use an immediate watcher instead:
watch: {
id: {
handler(newId, oldId) {
this.populateFromApi(newId);
},
immediate: true
}
}
Now it will call the watcher on component creation, and call it afterwards when you pass a different id. It will also help you gracefully handle cases where the component is created with a undefined or null value in one of the props you expect. Instead of throwing an error you just render nothing until the prop is valid.

Dynamically instantiating a component in Vue.js

Following this tutorial, I'm trying to programmatically create instances of a component on my page.
The main snippet is this:
import Button from 'Button.vue'
import Vue from 'vue'
var ComponentClass = Vue.extend(Button)
var instance = new ComponentClass()
instance.$mount()
this.$refs.container.appendChild(instance.$el)
However I get two errors:
The component I'm trying to instantiate contains references to the store, and these don't work: "TypeError: Cannot read property 'state' of undefined".
For the last line of the snippet (this.$refs.container.appendChild(instance.$el)) I get this error: "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'container' of undefined"
I'm really not sure how to troubleshoot this, if anyone strong in Vue.js could give me some hint as to why I'm getting these errors and to solve them that would be terrific.
1) Since you're manually instantiating that component and it doesn't belong to your main app's component tree, the store won't be automatically injected into it from your root component. You'll have to manually provide the store to the constructor when you instantiate the component ..
import ProjectRow from "./ProjectRow.vue";
import Vue from "vue";
import store from "../store";
let ProjectRowClass = Vue.extend(ProjectRow);
let ProjectRowInstance = new ProjectRowClass({ store });
2) In a Vue Single File Component (SFC), outside of the default export this doesn't refer to the Vue instance, so you don't have access to $refs or any other Vue instance property/method. To gain access to the Vue instance you'll need to move this line this.$refs.container.appendChild(instance.$el) somewhere inside the default export, for example in the mounted hook or inside one of your methods.
See this CodeSandbox for an example of how you may go about this.
This is another way to instantiate a component in Vue.js, you can use two different root elements.
// Instantiate you main app
var app = new Vue({
el: '#app',
data: {
message: 'Hello Vue!'
}
})
//
// Then instantiate your component dynamically
//
// Create a component or import it.
const Hello = {
props: ['text'],
template: '<div class="hello">{{ text }}</div>',
};
// Create a componentClass by Vue.
const HelloCtor = Vue.extend(Hello);
// Use componentClass to instantiate your component.
const vm = new HelloCtor({
propsData: {
text: 'HI :)'
}
})
// then mount it to an element.
.$mount('#mount');
It works by assigning "this" to the property "parent". By setting the parent you also have access to the $store in the new instance. (Provided that "this" is another Vue instance/Component and already has access to the store, of course)
new (Vue.extend(YourNewComponent))({
parent: this,
propsData: {
whatever: 'some value',
},
}).$mount(el.querySelector('.some-id'))
If you don't need the reference to the parent, you can just leave "parent: this," out.
Important note: When mounting many (like 500+) items on the page this way you will get a huge performance hit. It is better to only give the new Component the necessary stuff via props instead of giving it the entire "this" object.
I went down this path, following all the examples above, and even this one: https://css-tricks.com/creating-vue-js-component-instances-programmatically/
While I got far, and it works (I made a lot of components this way), at least for my case, it came with drawbacks. For example I'm using Vuetify at the same time, and the dynamically added components didn't belong to the outer form, which meant that while local (per component) validation worked, the form didn't receive the overall status. Another thing that did not work was to disable the form. With more work, passing the form as parent property, some of that got working, but what about removing components. That didn't go well. While they were invisible, they were not really removed (memory leak).
So I changed to use render functions. It is actually much easier, well documented (both Vue 2 and Vue 3), and everything just works. I also had good help from this project: https://koumoul-dev.github.io/vuetify-jsonschema-form/latest/
Basically, to add a function dynamically, just implement the render() function instead of using a template. Works a bit like React. You can implement any logic in here to choose the tag, the options, everything. Just return that, and Vue will build the shadow-DOM and keep the real DOM up to date.
The methods in here seems to manipulate the DOM directly, which I'm glad I no longer have to do.

VUE.JS - Using the vNode argument to add unknown quantity of items to a dynamic navigation

I'm currently trying to create a component which manages several linked dropdowns and elements on a page. In addition, this element supplies a rather fancy navigation element, containing anchor links which automatically scroll to the desired element in this component.
The problem is that the actual contents of the component are completely dynamic and partially determined by the content manager in the CMS. There are several sub components that are always present, but apart from that the content manager can add any number of sections, (using various named and an unnamed ) and each of these sections should be added to the navigation of the component.
I see 3 options:
For every component added, it's title and unique id is added to a property array on the parent component. This, however, is a bit prone to errors. (Unfortunately I will have no control over the eventual backend implementation, so I'm trying to create a foolproof system to avoid to much wasted time.)
Due to other components, I'm already using Vuex to manage most of the data in the app. I figured I use a simple directive, to be added on each item in the parent component. This directive is responsible for adding that element to the Vuex store. The parent component simply reads the contents of the store and generates the navigation based on this.
The problem here is that, as far as I can tell, I have to use the vNode argument in the bind hook of my directive to access the Vuex store. This seems... hacky. Is there anything wrong with this approach?
In the mounted hook of my parent component, I traverse the DOM, searching for elements with a particular data-property, and add a link to each of these elements to my navigation. Seems prone to failure and fragile.
What is the preferred approach for this situation?
As a follow up question - What is the correct use case for the vNode argument in a vue directive? The documentation seems rather sparse on this subject.
I would steer away from using a directive in this case. In Vue 2, the primary use case for directives is for low level DOM manipulation.
Note that in Vue 2.0, the primary form of code reuse and abstraction
is components - however there may be cases where you just need some
low-level DOM access on plain elements, and this is where custom
directives would still be useful.
Instead I would suggest a mixin approach, where your mixin essentially registers your components that should be included in navigation with Vuex.
Consider the following code.
const NavMixin = {
computed:{
navElement(){
return this.$el
},
title(){
return this.$vnode.tag.split("-").pop()
}
},
mounted(){
this.$store.commit('addLink', {
element: this.navElement,
title: this.title
})
}
}
This mixin defines a couple of computed values that determine the element that should be used for navigation and the title of the component. Obviously the title is a placeholder and you should modify it to suit your needs. The mounted hook registers the component with Vue. Should a component need a custom title or navElement, mixed in computed properties are overridden by the component's definition.
Next I define my components and use the mixin.
Vue.component("child1",{
mixins:[NavMixin],
template:`<h1>I am child1</h1>`
})
Vue.component("child2",{
mixins:[NavMixin],
template:`<h1>I am child2</h1>`
})
Vue.component("child3",{
template:`<h1>I am child3</h1>`
})
Note that here I am not adding the mixin to the third component, because I could conceive of a situation where you may not want all components included in navigation.
Here is a quick example of usage.
console.clear()
const store = new Vuex.Store({
state: {
links: []
},
mutations: {
addLink (state, link) {
state.links.push(link)
}
}
})
const NavMixin = {
computed:{
navElement(){
return this.$el
},
title(){
return this.$vnode.tag.split("-").pop()
}
},
mounted(){
this.$store.commit('addLink', {
element: this.navElement,
title: this.title
})
}
}
Vue.component("child1",{
mixins:[NavMixin],
template:`<h1>I am child1</h1>`,
})
Vue.component("child2",{
mixins:[NavMixin],
template:`<h1>I am child2</h1>`
})
Vue.component("child3",{
template:`<h1>I am child3</h1>`
})
Vue.component("container",{
template:`
<div>
<button v-for="link in $store.state.links" #click="scroll(link)">{{link.title}}</button>
<slot></slot>
</div>
`,
methods:{
scroll(link){
document.querySelector("body").scrollTop = link.element.offsetTop
}
},
})
new Vue({
el:"#app",
store
})
h1{
height:300px
}
<script src="https://unpkg.com/vue#2.2.6/dist/vue.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/vuex/2.3.1/vuex.js"></script>
<div id="app">
<container>
<child1></child1>
<child3></child3>
<child2></child2>
</container>
</div>
This solution is pretty robust. You do not need to parse anything. You have control over which components are added to the navigation. You handle potentially nested components. You said you don't know which types of components will be added, but you should have control over the definition of the components that will be used, which means its relatively simple to include the mixin.

Vue JS rc-1 Passing Data Through Props Not Working

In the release notes for Vue 1.0.0-rc.1, we are told
"The inherit option has been deprecated. Alway pass data to child
components via props."
However, the Component API section says
"$data can no longer be used as a prop."
I have been trying to pass data to child components of my root Vue instance, and have had no luck whatsoever.
In version 0.12.*, if you want/need access to a parent instance's data, methods, etc., you would simply add...
inherit: true
...to a child component.
Now, in attempting to access the parent data via props, I continue to hit a brick wall. Here is a simplified example:
app.js:
new Vue({
el: '#app',
data: {
authorized: false,
currentView: 'welcome-view'
},
components: {
'welcome-view': require('./views/welcome')
}
});
views/welcome.js:
module.exports = {
props: ['authorized'],
template: require('./welcome.template.html')
};
views/welcome.template.html:
<div v-if="authorized"><p>You Are Logged In</p></div>
<div v-else>Please Log In</div>
Main View File (app.blade.php)
...
<body id="app">
<component :is="currentView"></component>
</body>
...
The 'authorized' prop is not recognized at all this way. It works outside of the component (within the "app" id) just fine, but not within the template.
At the moment, I can access the data I need by using $root everywhere I need it. For instance:
<div v-if="$root.authorized"><p>You Are Logged In</p></div>
But, my understanding is that this is 'bad form' all around, as the docs say:
Although it’s possible to access any instance the parent chain, you
should avoid directly relying on parent data in a child component and
prefer passing data down explicitly using props.
So, what I need to know is... how can I explicitly use props? I am clearly going about it the wrong way, since they are not available to my child components if I just list them in the 'props: []' array. What am I missing here?
At the end of the day, what is the best way (standards and practices) to refactor my current code to replace 'inherit: true', and still have access to the root instance data and functions? Any help/advice on this would be most welcome. Thanks in advance.
See #StephenHallgren's answer on this page for the correct way to access props in the HTML.
As for the rest of it, (how to properly refactor code to replace 'inherit:true', I am including here the answer I received from Evan Y. on the official Vue forum, in case anyone else runs across this in the future.
His answer to the question posed above was:
If you are fairly certain about the structure, you can use
$root.authorized.
Alternatively, don't put the authorized state in the root at all. Have
a dedicated module for user state that can be imported in any
component. See
http://rc.vuejs.org/guide/application.html#State_Management
My take-away from this is that - where there are concrete, global variables that will not change, and the app structure is sound, it is okay to use $root (or $parent as the case may be), and - where elements have state that will sometimes change (such as whether or not a user is authorized/logged in), the key is to use a state management module.
Meanwhile, when passing down props between parent and child, one must declare the props in the props array, then bind them to the component in the HTML.
For example...
app.js:
new Vue({
el: '#app',
data: {
authorized: false,
currentView: 'welcome-view'
},
components: {
'welcome-view': require('./views/welcome')
}
});
views/welcome.js:
module.exports = {
props: ['authorized'],
template: require('./welcome.template.html')
}
welcome.template.html:
<div v-if="authorized"><p>You Are Logged In</p></div>
<div v-else>Please Log In</div>
main HTML
<body id="app">
<component :is="currentView" v-bind:authorized="authorized"></component>
</body>
(or shorthand)
<body id="app">
<component :is="currentView" :authorized="authorized"></component>
</body>
I was having the same issue and didn't realize that you also have to bind the value to the component prop like this:
v-bind:authorized="authorized"
or the shorthand
:authorized="authorized"
Here's an example of something that I had been working on that illustrates the solution: http://jsfiddle.net/yyx990803/2uqmj2jj/6/