I'm wondering if their is a tutorial on how to convert an admin UI into Ember components? What are the best practices? For example, the following UI framework: http://egemem.com/theme/kode/v1.1/blank.html
Has a main navigation, two sidebar menus, a content body and a footer. What would the best approach be to converting this into components? My initial thoughts, with very little Ember experience and based on the scattering of documents I've been able to find, I get the sense that creating unique components for everything would be the best approach. By everything I mean, everything that is unique. For example, if we take the navigation bar, there would be a parent component for the navigation as a whole and then child components for the sidebar collapse/expand buttons, the search, the drop down menus, notification indicator, etc. There would also be additional parent components for the right hand sidebar, left hand sidebar, and footer.
Looking at one of the sidebars, for example the left one, could that be one component or would child components be required here as well?
The right hand sidebar is more complex with tabs. In this example, would it make sense to break this sidebar into child components for the 3 different tabs? Would you want to go as far as a unique component for different elements of the tabs themselves. For example, each notification type would be a component?
Thank you in advance for your assistance send I look forward to understanding how best to handle this type of scenario.
Cheers,
Dan
Yes, your idea makes sense. It is a good practice to create components (or handlebars) for everything that repeats several times. I would not create different components for different tabs if they are not re-used.
Do not forget to not re-invent wheel. There are a lot of available components, take a look at Ember Observer or other similar resources.
Components are great but some the things you mentioned, like sidebars, might make more sense as nested routes, depending on what's in the sidebars.
Rock 'n Roll with Ember is a fantastic book that takes you all the way through the process of building an Ember application. It's the book I always recommend to people just getting started with the framework. http://balinterdi.com/rock-and-roll-with-emberjs/
Related
Our Application has components which consume components with consume components of varying complexity. So i just want the input on the page, to validate when an object is set that the text is correct. The issue is that it is one of these subcomponents.
My colleague told me that there is 2 ways to do this, The first is to use Page Objects, and Chaining annotation to find it on my page, and then find the next id etc until my input is found. It requires me to look through another teams' Component Markup to narrow it down to the input i want to leverage. I dont believe I should have to go into another component definition, or a definition of a definition to get the appropriate chain to get this arbitrary input. It starts to create issues where if a lateral team creates changes unbeknownst to me, my PO will be broken.
The other option my friend asked was to use fixture.query to find the component. This would be as simple as:
fixture.query((el)=> el.attribute["id"] == "description",
(comp){
expect(comp.value, value);
});`
Using Query looks at the markup but then will automatically componentize it as the appropriate SubComponent. In this case, comp.value is the value stored in the HTML. So, if i did something like:
fixture.update((MainComponent comp) {
comp.myinput.value = new Foo();
});
Then I am setting and getting this programmatically, so i am a bit unsure if it properly would reflect what is on the screen.
Whats the best course of action? It seems PO would be better, but im not sure if there is a way around having to deep query for input boxes outside of the component i am testing.
Thanks
I don't think I have a definitive answer for you but I can tell you how we do it at Google. For pretty much any component we provide the page object alongside the component. This is twofold it is for testing that widget, and also so we can have this as a shareable resource for other tests.
For leaf widgets the page objects are a little less fleshed out and are really just there for the local test. For components that are shared heavily the page object is a bit more flushed out for reusability. Without this much of the API for the widget (html, css, etc) we would need to consider public and changes to them would be very hard (person responsible for making the public breaking change needs to fix all associated code.) With it we can have a contract to only support the page object API and html structure changes are not considered breaking changes. At times we have even gone so far as to have two page objects for a widget. One for the local test, and one to share. Sometimes the API you want to expose for a local test is much more than you want people to use themselves.
We can then compose these page objects into higher level page objects that represent the widget. Good page objects support a higher level of abstraction for that widget. For example a calendar widget would let you go to the next/previous month, get the current selected date, etc. rather than directly exposing the buttons/inputs that accomplish those actions.
We plan to expose these page objects for angular_components eventually, but we are currently working on how to expose these. Our internal package structure is different than what we have externally. We have many packages per individual widget (page_objects, examples, widget itself) and we need to reconcile this externally before we expose them.
Here is an example:
import 'package:pageloader/objects.dart';
import 'material_button_po.dart';
/// Webdriver page object for `material-yes-no-buttons` component.
#EnsureTag('material-yes-no-buttons')
class MaterialYesNoButtonsPO {
#ByClass('btn-yes')
#optional
MaterialButtonPO yesButton;
#ByClass('btn-no')
#optional
MaterialButtonPO noButton;
}
When using Backbone.js and a template framework such as Underscore or Handlebars (Im using Handlebgars) when should a view have sub views?
For example I'm making a single page website that has like 5 different "pages" each page has different areas on it that show different data. A good example is the dashboard, it has about half a dozen widgets on it that show summaries of data. Each widget is unrelated to the others.
What I'm inclined to do is to make one view for each of the 5 pages and then to have those 5 views each load sub views into themselves.
This seems very logical to me but I cant seem to find any tutorials / documentation on it.
Is this a design pattern? Has anyone done this sort of thing?
Thanks.
I think it's a good idea to think in terms of seperation of concerns when it comes to views and subviews. In your example the dashboard contains 5 subviews. The dashboard shouldn't care how these subviews work and what they do. The subviews on the other hand shouldn't care about where they will be placed.
You'll make your live easier of you seperate your views this way, it's easier to maintain and it's also easier to swap views around in your application.
I seem to be getting more and more confounded at what appears, on the surface at least to be pretty basic architectural questions regarding building ember apps.
Which Controller type?
In the last month or so, I've seen people implement controllers through Ember.Controller, Ember.ArrayController, Ember.ObjectController, and Ember.ArrayProxy. Removing ArrayController and ArrayProxy (due to them being identical), what are common use cases between each type?
So far, i've been able to gather that:
ArrayControllers/Proxies should be used when you have n elements within the view you intend to control
ObjectControllers should be used when the view is simple enough to maintain it's state in a single object, or be a single instance of a model's object.
Controllers --- ? No idea.
What are some basic differences between the controller types? There doesn't seem to be concrete information on when to use which, and for which use case. The API docs are good at telling me the nitty gritty of each of them, but not WHEN to use each.
The relationship between a View and a Controller can be baffling
When a View is connected via a routes ConnectOutlets function call, what exactly happens between the controller and the view?
Are events tied into the view itself (which seems to be the case) and if so, where on earth do you interact with the controller singleton to perform CRUD-esq things on its properties? this.get('controllerName') doesn't seem to do the trick, and nearly each post or tutorial or code sample out there does this a different way.
Models that aren't
I realize that Ember Data looks to help solve some of the more irritating parts of dealing with data and keeping it in sync, but at a larger perspective, in the concept of "MVC", ember doesn't really seem to have a Model of any kind. It's just some object that gets subclassed from a specific thing and then tracked....somewhere? Somehow? Magical?
#trek sufficed that an Ember.Object could manage ajax'ing data and handling state on the client just fine, but if you look at something like the todomvc.com ember app, it uses a localStorage paradigm that is COMPLETELY different in implementation then everything i've looked at.
How EXACTLY should the 'Model' part of the MVC equation be done here?
Views make me want to murder children
There seems to be a significant number of ways to construct a "view" in terms of displaying markup to a user.
ContainerViews, using subviews / childviews
nested outlets
Handlebars templates + an outlet
using #each foo in controller
Injection through literals (template: Ember.Handlebars.compile('<h1>foo</h1>') etc)
With that in mind, what's the 'proper' way to build modular UI components with ember? This more than anything is a major pain point for the adoption of this framework for me.
I love the direction that Ember is going with application development on the web. The concepts seem simple, but the verbosity is that of Objective-C (which makes sense given it's lineage) but I swear to god I feel like i'm fighting the god damned framework more than i'm actually working on my application. The verbosity of the syntax and the lack of structured documentation outside of API documentation (which lets face it, 300k of javascript is a significant amount of code to throw some breakpoints down and try to debug your issues).
I realize the challenge that you guys are up against, but hopefully this at least makes you pause for a minute and think of how you could make life easier for the incoming developer who's worked with other frameworks (or hell, even worked within an MVC framework, like rails or django or backbone or angular) and say "this is how we think ember should be used".
Take some of the opinionated software design decisions and apply them toward the community. We'll do nothing but be cheerleaders for you if you do it, promise.
Please don't hurt any children. AFAIK the ember-core team are all over 18, so any ember-view-related frustration is clearly better directed towards adults. With that in mind...
Which Controller Type?
You've got the "what" right, but maybe missing the "why". Controller can be a little misleading, especially coming from rails. Think of these controller singletons as representing the state (in-memory) of your application.
Which kind of controller to use depends on what is required for that part of your application. For example, a back-of-napkin sketch for any app might have a topnav, postList, postDetails section. In ember, each is represented by one or more view/controller pairs. In this app I would expect to see ApplicationController and NavigationController extending Ember.Controler while postList would extend ArrayController and PostDetails would be an ObjectController.
You could do it all using just Ember.Controller but ObjectController and ArrayController are really useful for wrapping model data. Any non-trivial ember app will probably use all three.
The relationship between a View and a Controller
A controller's job is to provide the context in which the view will be rendered. Ideally you'd like to keep logic out of views, so a typical controller will have lots of computed properties to do things like:
transform data from the underlying model objects
sort/filter/select a list of objects
reflect application state
whats the deal with connectOutlets? This is where you should be using the requested route/context to decide which views/data should be plugged into the outlets of your application. The controller's connectOutlet method has a bunch of magic to make it easy, but maybe too much magic. What happens (afaik) when you call: parentcontroller.connectOutlet 'child' is
Ember creates an instance of ChildView
The {{outlet}} handlebars helper in parentController's view is bound to this childView instance
The childView is rendered with the router.childController singleton as it's context
where to do crud stuff?: Typically in an action on the router. This seems crazy at first. Think of ember router not like rails but as a stateManager that just happens to also handle routing. In near-future router API will change to make this more clear. Anyway, use router actions to do things like create model instances, commit/rollback transactions and trigger state change. This is easy to do if you use the handlebars {{action}} helper for links/buttons as it targets the router by default.
Views on the other hand should have logic for "reacting to browser events" - that means really low-level stuff like show/hide something on mouseover or integrate with 3rd party libraries to do effects and animations.
You might find this screencast helpful in understanding how to do CRUD-esq things:
http://blog.bigbinary.com/2012/09/06/crud-application-in-emberjs.html
Models WTF?
Agreed in Ember any object could be used as a 'Model'. I think #trek does a good job of demonstrating how one might accomplish this via Ember.Object. This works great for a simple app, and six months back maybe would've been your best bet as ember-data was really immature. I'm not clear on the history of ember's todomvc app, but for sure it was written months ago. For sure it should be updated, but meantime I'd not recommend using it to learn about current ember best-practices.
Instead, you should go with ember-data. Over the last few months it has really evolved and should be the default choice for any new, non-trivial ember app. #tomdale just gave a great presentation on this topic, I'd recommend having a look: https://speakerdeck.com/tomdale/ember-data-internals
what's the 'proper' way to build modular UI components with ember?
For building modular UI components:
ContainerViews, using subviews / childviews
Injection through literals (template: Ember.Handlebars.compile ...)
For building an individual application:
nested outlets
Handlebars templates + an outlet
using #each foo in controller
Building modular UI components is a totally different problem than building an application. Ember.View and it's subclasses were designed for this purpose. You can easily extend/combine them to compose widgets with custom behaviors and share those widgets across applications.
At least that's how i've seen it done. If they are for internal use could also reference handlebars templates instead of object literals, but if planning to distribute the object literals approach seems best.
A great real-world example of this is the ember-bootstrap project. I learned a lot about working with ember-views by reading through that project's source. http://emberjs-addons.github.com/ember-bootstrap/
TLDR
Pick controller that maps to type of data being represented
Controllers provide context for the view and remember application state
Use ember data for your models
Use subclasses of Ember.View to make components
Be nice to children
Is it good practice to have multiple statemanagers for the purpose of splitting up multiple outlets that need to maintain separate functionality?
Examples:
iPad style popover windows (http://metalabdesign.com/images/screenshots/flow-inside.png) - this is a separate controller and view then the current state. It makes sense to me to have a "popover statemanager" - that way the router still stays in its current state when the popover is opened - all the other buttons and actions on the page still work...
Modal windows, dynamic sidebars, etc...
My thinking is to have a router the controls the main interaction and it simply fires off commands to statemanagers that break up certain "sections" of the current "screen" to isolated parts.
You should have only one router. Then architect your whole application as a series of states interacting between each other through the router. This way your whole application is much more manageable and easier to test.
You might want to look at This presentation for further insight on the subject.
So I have been looking around for a couple hours for a solid solution to handling site navigation in CakePHP. Over the course of a dozen projects, I have rigged together something that works for each one, but what I'm looking for is ideally a CakePHP plugin that handles the following:
Navigation Model
Component for handing off to the view
Element View Helper for displaying the navigation (with control over sublevels displayed and automatically determining the "active" item based on URL and/or controller/model/slug
Admin pages for managing a tree of navigation
Any suggestions for an all-in-one solution or even the individual components would be very appreciated! Or even suggestions on how you have handled it in the past
We had this issue at work recently and i ended up whiping up a helper that would take query from the contents table and convert that into a menu. As it needed to become more flexible the code got worse and worse up to the point where i am currently rewriting it.
Don't hold your breath though as i will be taking my time to make it work right as it needs to be very flexible but it cant be confusing to use.