NOPR9D ☄️

Posted on Jan 9, 2021 • Updated on Jan 11, 2021

Build Single Page App with Rx [From scratch]

#javascript #html #webdev #tutorial


How ?
Basic, add your Html
Implement RxJS from Scratch
Fetch html files, Generate components
Router and Pages
Exemple
Repo github

How ?

So, you have already worked on current frameworks like Angular, Vue or React and you wanna build a single page app.

But this time you wanna challenge yourself and build all from strach, if this is not enougth you also wanna implement your own RxJS.

Here we will see how we can do this, simply and efficiently.

So for this we will just use javascript, Html, Css and nodejs for live-refresh

Before if you want you can take a look to :

Basic, add your Html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta
      name="viewport"
      content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no"
    />
    <title>Exemple</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <my-header></my-header>
    <div id="app"></div>
    <my-footer></my-footer>
  </body>
  <script type="module" src="./index.js"></script>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="./styles/index.css" />
</html>

<script type="module" src="./index.js"></script>

Cause we import our script like a module, we import any other js file with "import { } from './any.js'" in our js file.

<my-header></my-header>

<my-footer></my-footer>

<div id="app"></div>

This is the container we will use for our single app view.

These Custom elements are undefined for the moment, later you will be able to replace 'my-' with your own naming convention.

Implement RxJS from Scratch

For this part we can say Thanks to Andrea Bertoli for Implements RxJS from Scratch, we will use a lighter version

So,

If you want to implements our own RxJS we need to begin with Subscriptions class, this is a container for functions, including the old one. When you call the unsubscribe method, each of there functions will be called.

// a container for functions
class Subscription {
  constructor() {
    this.teardowns = [];
  }
  add(teardown) {
    this.teardowns.push(teardown);
  }
  unsubscribe() {
    this.teardowns.forEach((teardown) => teardown());
    this.teardowns = [];
  }
}

Operator composition with pipe

The concept of pipe if simple, it combiens n functions, calling each with the output of the last one.
This is the logic we need to chain Observables, the pipe method will return another Observable.

const pipe = (...fns) => (val) => fns.reduce((acc, f) => f(acc), val);

With pipe, we need to implement the Observable abstraction with a class too.

When we init it, this class requires a function as argument initFunc, so he use the subscribe function, the initFunc will be called with the observer as argument.

const pipe = (...fns) => (val) => fns.reduce((acc, f) => f(acc), val);

class Observable {
  constructor(initFunc) {
    this.initFunc = initFunc;
  }
  subscribe(observer) {
    const subscription = new Subscription();
    const subscriber = new Subscriber(observer, subscription);
    const teardown = this.initFunc(subscriber);
    subscription.add(teardown);
    return subscription;
  }
  pipe(...fns) {
    // provide source Obx to each function returned from pipeable operators,
    // to start the chaining operation provide the current source Obx (this)
    return pipe(...fns)(this);
  }
}

At last we need to implement an proxy-like object, the role of Subscriber class is to stops the event propagation into the wrapped Observer if complete is called.

// a safe wrapper around observers
export default class Subscriber {
  constructor(_observer, _subscription) {
    this.observer = _observer;
    this.closed = false;
    this.subscription = _subscription;
    // 1. add an Observer completion logic to the Subscription container
    this.subscription.add(() => (this.closed = true)); // <- first function inside the subscription
  }
  next(value) {
    if (!this.closed) {
      this.observer.next(value);
    }
  }
  error(err) {
    if (!this.closed) {
      this.closed = true;
      this.observer.error(err);
      // 2. enable the Subscriber to call `unsubscribe` on completion
      this.subscription.unsubscribe(); // <- unsubscribe on error
    }
  }
  complete() {
    if (!this.closed) {
      this.closed = true;
      this.observer.complete();
      this.subscription.unsubscribe(); // <- unsubscribe on completion
    }
  }
}

Fetch html files | Generate components

Welcome to the fetch part ! Cause we are in local use and without any dependencies, we need to fetch ourself our html files. No, you can't import them like import * as htmlTemplate from './template.html.

But you know what? Now we had implemented our own RxJS, we can use an Observable instead of a Promise.

We can create a method called _fetchLocal in a api.js file, return a new Observable with the request value.

_fetchLocal will take the path and the name of the html file you wanna import. (So we can import page and components with the same function).

import Observable from "./../reactive/Observable.js";

export const _fetchLocal = (path, file) => {
  return new Observable((observer) => {
    const req = new XMLHttpRequest();
    const url = `${path}/${file}`;
    req.responseType = "text/html";
    req.open("GET", url);
    req.send();
    req.onloadend = (e) => {
      observer.next(req);
    };
  });
};

Now you can create a dom.js file and put in it the registerComponent function, this function will take the component Class as argument.

In this function you can customise your own naming convention for component or page (feel free to add your logic to this function)

export const registerComponent = (componentClass) => {
  const componentName = `my-${componentClass.name.toLowerCase()}`;
  customElements.define(componentName, componentClass);
};

Now we had your base and we can begin to work easier, let's create a compoments folder and create our first compomenents.

In it create files for footer and header (Footer.html,Footer.js,Header.html,Header.js), don't forget, we use Custom Elements, so in this case we extends our class to HTMLElement.

In the constructor we fetch the associated template with our _fetchLocal method.

<!-- footer -->
<div class="footer">
  Hey footer
</div>

import { _fetchLocal } from "./../scripts/api/index.js";

// Footer
export default class Footer extends HTMLElement {
  constructor() {
    super();
    _fetchLocal("/components", "Footer.html").subscribe({
      next: (data) => {
        this.innerHTML = data.response;
      },
    });
  }
}

<!-- header -->
<div class="flex-row">
  <nav class="nav">
    <a href="/" class="nav__link" data-link>Home</a>
    <a href="/dashboard" class="nav__link" data-link>Dashboard</a>
    <a href="/thispagedontexist" class="nav__link" data-link
      >This page don't exist</a
    >
  </nav>
</div>

// Header
export default class Header extends HTMLElement {
  constructor() {
    super();
  }
  connectedCallback() {
    _fetchLocal("/components", "Header.html").subscribe({
      next: (data) => {
        this.innerHTML = data.response;
      },
    });
  }
}

So, now we need to register our component.

In our main.js create a define method, we register all of our component in it, for that we use our registerComponent.

Put the define method in your init function.

import Header from "./../components/Header.js";
import Footer from "./../components/Footer.js";

import { _fetchLocal } from "./api/index.js";

import { registerComponent } from "./dom/index.js";

export function init() {
  define();
}

function define() {
  registerComponent(Header);
  registerComponent(Footer);
}

Router and Pages

We had our reactive logic, our components are reconized by the app, now we can attack the Router and Pages.

We begin with the easlier, like the components we can create the files for our pages, we also respect the component logic.

So we can create files for 404, Dashboard and Home into a pages folder. (404.html,404.js,Dashboard.html,Dashboard.js,Home.html,Home.js)

<!-- 404 -->
<div class="404">
  <div>Are you lost ?</div>
</div>

import { _fetchLocal } from "./../scripts/api/index.js";

export default class NotFound extends HTMLElement {
  constructor() {
    super();
    _fetchLocal("/components", "404.html").subscribe({
      next: (data) => {
        this.innerHTML = data.response;
      },
    });
  }
}

<!-- Dashboard -->
<div class="dashboard">
  <div>this is dashboard</div>
</div>

import { _fetchLocal } from "./../scripts/api/index.js";

export default class Dashboard extends HTMLElement {
  constructor() {
    super();
    _fetchLocal("/components", "Dashboard.html").subscribe({
      next: (data) => {
        this.innerHTML = data.response;
      },
    });
  }
}

<!-- Home -->
<div class="home">
  <div>this is home</div>
</div>

import { _fetchLocal } from "./../scripts/api/index.js";

export default class Home extends HTMLElement {
  constructor() {
    super();
    _fetchLocal("/components", "Home.html").subscribe({
      next: (data) => {
        this.innerHTML = data.response;
      },
    });
  }
}

So create a router folder and index.js file.

In our index.js file you can put our routing logic into and routes Object with path and component as key.

Like this :

export const routes = [
  { path: "/", component: "Home" },
  { path: "/dashboard", component: "Dashboard" },
  { path: "/home", component: "Home" },
  { path: "/404", component: "404" },
];

Now we need a Views class, so we can set the fetched HTML provided by the view into our #app container.

In the constructor get the user location pathname, compare it to the path of our routes, if no match we will show the 404 page.

The getHtml method return the result of _fetchLocal and the setView method put the fetched html into the #app container.

import { routes } from "./../router/index.js";
import { _fetchLocal } from "./../api/index.js";

export default class Views {
  layout;
  constructor() {
    this.layout = routes.filter((route) => {
      return route.path === location.pathname;
    })[0] || { component: "404" };
    this.getHtml().subscribe({ next: this.setView });
  }

  getHtml() {
    return _fetchLocal("/pages", `${this.layout.component}.html`);
  }

  setView(data) {
    document.querySelector("#app").innerHTML = data.response;
  }
}

Comeback to our main.js file and call an instance of Views class in the define function.

import Header from "./../components/Header.js";
import Footer from "./../components/Footer.js";

import { _fetchLocal } from "./api/index.js";

import { registerComponent } from "./dom/index.js";
import Views from "./dom/views.js";

export function init() {
  define();
}

function define() {
  registerComponent(Header);
  registerComponent(Footer);

  new Views();
}

For the presentation we can add a little of css, for auto-size and centered layout add this :

html,
body {
  height: 100%;
  width: auto;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
}

/* reset all */
*::before,
*::after {
  box-sizing: border-box;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

a {
  padding: 0.25em;
}

#app {
  display: flex;
  flex-grow: 1;
  align-items: center;
  align-self: center;
}

Exemple

Now we can see our result with this online exemple. As you see we had our Header, our Footer and the layout of the #app container use our router logic and show the requested page. Our single page app is created, is reactive, all it's good !