Mutuable property passed from template is not updated - ember.js

I have a case where I am passing a property to child component wrapped inside a mut helper. Then I am updating this value in child component, and send action into parent component using closure action.
Then if I read this value in parent component with get, I get correct value. But if I pass this property to action from template, I get not updated value.
I've provided an Ember-Twiddle to illustrate this problem (check out console.log).
Am I missing something in this solution? Or is it working as expected? Please take a look at onInnerUp action in index controller to see what I am trying to do.
I know this is very messy description, hope someone will understand what am I struggling with

It is working as expected. Here is why?
When the template index.hbs is rendered at some point it creates an action via the action helper with the current value assigned to controllerVal. In your case; after the initial render that value is 0.
The action will only be recreated after the template is re-rendered. In your twiddle you are not waiting for the template to re-render and immediately triggering the action (which has already been created with the previous value of controllerVal). Even though the controllerVal is increased automatically (due to two-way-binding) when value within my-component.js is increased; the action is not yet re-created and holds the previous value; hence you get previus value that was assigned to controllerVal as parameter to your action. I hope I manage to explain what is going on in a simple way.
In fact Lux has already explained the way to overcome this situation in his comment above; but I have created a modified twiddle for you. In this twiddle I am not immediately triggering the action; but delaying it till the next rendering is finished via Ember.run.scheduleOnce(queue, target, method). I used afterRender queue in order to wait for rerendering of the template. You can look further for Ember run loop if you like. This might be a good starting point I guess. My best regards.

Related

Ember.js: sending actions to components?

I have a mixin for Ember components, named in-view, the job of which is to request that that the element be brought in view. It is provided an attribute whose value is an piece of content to be brought into view, and if that attribute matches the component's content then I call scrollIntoView or the equivalent. The code looks something like this:
// calling template
{{#each items as |item|}}
{{my-item content=item inViewItem=inViewItem}}
}}
// mixins/in-view.js
scrollIntoView() {
if (this.get('content') === this.get('inViewItem'))
this.get('element').scrollIntoView();
}.on('didInsertElement')
// components/my-item/component.js
import InView from 'mixins/in-view';
export default Ember.Component.extend(InView,
This works fine. The question I have arises when I want to change the item in view. I can have the in-view mixin observe the inviewItem attribute:
}.on('didInsertElement').observes('inViewItem')
and this also works, but seems like a bit of a code smell.
In addition, my actual code structure is that there is a controller which knows which item is supposed to be in view, and then its template calls a my-item-list component which displays the scrollable div containing the item list, and that in turn calls the my-item component. This means I have to pass the inViewItem attribute from the controller down through two levels, as in
// resource/controller.js
inViewItem: something
// resource/template.js
{{my-item-list items=item inViewItem=inViewItem}}
// components/my-item-list/template.js
{{#each items as |item|}}
{{my-item content=item inViewItem=inViewItem}}
}}
I could avoid this by having the my-item template hard-wired to access the inViewItem attribute on the controller:
scrollIntoView() {
if (this.get('content') === this.get('controller.inViewItem'))
this.get('element').scrollIntoView();
}.on('didInsertElement')
but that's another code smell; I don't want to build this kind of dependency on a specific controller field into the mixin. Instead I could possibly pass the component the name of the controller attribute to watch, but this seems unduly clumsy, and it's tricky to observe an attribute whose name is variable. More importantly, I don't think this will work when controllers go away in 2.0.
What I want essentially is a way to "ping" or somehow send a message to a template. I know that in principle this violates the DDAU principle, but in this particular case what I need is exactly to somehow send an "action down"--an action telling the component to adjust itself to bring itself into view.
Of course, I could give up on the entire idea of the in-view mixin and simply have the controller dig down into the generated HTML to find the item to bring into view and issue the scrollIntoView on it directly. However, this seems to violate some principle of separation of concerns; the my-item template would no longer be in complete control of itself.
What is the recommended design pattern for this kind of case?
The solution here is to go the opposite direction that you have. Your component here is a localized scope, and the pain you are feeling is that your localized scope needs to access and mutate global state (the app's scroll position).
Some people use a scroll-service for keeping track of and mutating state, I've used several variations on that myself.
It sounds though like you're dealing with a scrollable list, perhaps a div, and that what item is in view isn't merely a function of page state, but programmatically may change. For instance, a new item has been inserted and you want to scroll the new item into view.
A plugin like jquery.scrollTo or similar (collectively "scroller") would be better for that than simply jumping to the new position as it preserves the user's contextual awareness to where they are on page.
With a scrollable div or list or similar, you might choose to have your top level component control scroll state. The scroll state is still localized in this case, but instead of being localized to each item it's been localized to the scrollable region as a whole, which is where it better belongs.
There are a number of patterns for list items to register themselves with a parent list-component. In a robust scenario, I might do so, but a quick and not very dirty approach is to do something wherein on didInsertElement the new child emits an action to the parent containing it's context, which the parent then uses to check if it's the active item and if so triggers the scrollTo.

Ember.js input action get element

I'm sorry I couldn't figure out something so basic and had to ask here, but in the newUser callback function, how do I get a reference to that input element?
{{input action="newUser"}}
I tried param=this this.$() this.get('element') Nothing worked in Ember 1.7
You could try
this.$('input')
which will return a jQuery-style element set on which you can do more jQuery-type things, or
this.get('element').querySelector('input')
this.get('element') will return the view element, so you need to poke down into it to find the input element, whether by tagname as above, or via some other selection mechanism such as id or class.
However, this assumes the action is defined within the view, where this.$ and this.get('element') are defined. It will not work if the action is defined on the controller or route. It is a common Ember pattern to have an action handler on the view, which does view-related things, and then sends some action along to the controller for it to do controller-related things.
However, if you are trying to retrieve the input element just in order to muck with its value, then you can do this much more easily by simply modifying the property bound to the input elements' value.
You don't even need a reference to the element to clear it. Just use data-binding:
http://emberjs.jsbin.com/telat/1/edit

emberjs get automatic controller

I'm trying to test my app with qunit and sinon. I want to test some behaviour of the controller including its setup on a transition. For example in 'setupController' in a given route.
However the problem is that the controller is automatically created and I only know that you can get it with a 'controllerFor' call in the route. How can I get at the auto generated controller(s) for a given page from the outside, e.g. App.xxxxx
Note that I tried doing a 'transitionTo' passing the controller as the second argument but this means that 'setupController' never gets called so I can't test the scenario I wanted to. If there were a way to force setupController to be called even when you pass the second argument this would do the job
Thanks for any help

How is Ember handling this controller .property()

I am displaying a list of Document titles on the site's sidebar area. To achieve this I created a documents property on the App.SidebarController
Document = require '../models/document'
SidebarController = Ember.Controller.extend
documents: (->
Document.find()
).property()
module.exports = SidebarController
This works fine, when I create a new Document in my application, this sidebar property get's updated automatically and I don't know why. It works no matter what I put in the .property() function. e.g.
.property('Document')
.property('App.Document')
Can somebody explain how this works? What would be the correct thing for the property() function to observe?
So you are basically saying that is works, but you would like to know why.
Here is my guess: When your controller gets rendered, your computed property gets computed for the first time and an instance of an array is returned. When you create a new Document, i think this very same array is updated (= Document is added). So it does work despite the fact, that you do not specify a dependent key on property(). This is because the right array is already in place. As i said just a guess, but this seems like an understandable explanation.
And what would be the correct thing to do?
IMHO one should not use such Data Access methods directly in a computed property. Instead you should call this Data Access method inside a Route and then assign it to the controller. This way you make sure, that the find() method gets executed when needed.

Ember classNameBindings not being called for the sample program

I am facing issue with class name bindings. Here is the jsfiddle code for the same. Logging the number of times binding is called. It is never called when the property is changed.
You appear to have a couple of issues here. Primarily, if you want properties to be recalculated when the contents of an array change, you cannot just depend on the array property itself - it will only fire a change when it is set to a different array. If you depend on myArray.#each instead, your property will be recalculated when the contents change as well.
Next, your template containing the span isn't rendering because you're providing an empty view template in your handlebars view declaration. Change your "HTML" to:
{{view App.contact}}
and your span will appear.
Finally, running Ember.run.sync() does not appear to be enough here. I am not as clear on the reason behind this but...computed properties only update when read (versus observers that update immediately). I would hypothesize that since your computed property is only used by the view and the view may only update on a subsequent run through the JS event loop, your computed property is recalculated only once for all your changes to "subordinates". Change your code to use timeouts and it'll work fine.
Here's a jsfiddle with all of my proposed changes.