How to create a global snackbar using Nuxt, Vuetify and Vuex.

TL;DR

Code here

Intro

Snackbars, also known as alerts or toasts, are present in every application. They are handy to show important information after an user interaction. If you are using Vuetify's snackbar component, you might have realized there isn't a global object to call a function and show your snackbar component. I have used Quasar for a short time and I fell in love with this.$q.notify('Message'), so I tried to replicate the behavior with Vuetify and Vuex, and I will share here how I did it. For this tutorial, I'll be using Nuxt but you can adapt the code for vanilla Vue applications as well (kudos to David for showing how to implement the snackbar without Nuxt: https://dev.to/dzvid/comment/17nip).

Store

First we need to create a store module for our snackbar. If you don't know Vuex, think the store as a global repository for our variables. More information about Nuxt and Vuex can be found here.

// ~/store/snackbar.js

export const state = () => ({
  content: '',
  color: ''
})

export const mutations = {
  showMessage (state, payload) {
    state.content = payload.content
    state.color = payload.color
  }
}

Our store will have the content and the color states. This data will be used to fill our snackbar component.

It isn't a good practice to modify state data directly, so we created a mutation named showMessage. It will change the state values and make it easier to listen for changes.

Plugin

In order to have the notifier function available across the application, we need to create a plugin. We could to skip creating this plugin and just use this.$store.commit(...) or use mapMutation(...) on our components, but this.$notifier.showMessage(...) is more legible and it avoids to map mutations to multiple components.

// ~/plugins/notifier.js

export default ({ app, store }, inject) => {
  inject('notifier', {
    showMessage ({ content = '', color = '' }) {
      store.commit('snackbar/showMessage', { content, color })
    }
  })
}

This code injects a $notifier across our components. This object has the showMessage function that receives content and color and commits showMessage mutation to our snackbar store. For more information about Nuxt plugins, you can check here.

We also need to register the plugin on nuxt.config.js

export default {
  ...
  plugins: [
    '~/plugins/notifier.js'
  ],
  ...
}

Snackbar component

Our snackbar component will be simple. It will be responsible for showing the message on screen.

// ~/components/Snackbar.vue

<template>
  <v-snackbar v-model="show" :color="color">
    {{ message }}
    <v-btn text @click="show = false">Close</v-btn>
  </v-snackbar>
</template>

<script>
export default {
  data () {
    return {
      show: false,
      message: '',
      color: ''
    }
  },

  created () {
    this.$store.subscribe((mutation, state) => {
      if (mutation.type === 'snackbar/showMessage') {
        this.message = state.snackbar.content
        this.color = state.snackbar.color
        this.show = true
      }
    })
  }
}
</script>

When the component is created it starts to listen for the mutation. It will set snackbar information and show it when the mutation showMessage from our snackbar store is called.

Layout

We have to add our snackbar to our application:

// ~/layouts/default.vue

<template>
  <v-app>
    ...
    <Snackbar></Snackbar>
    ...
  </v-app>
</template>

<script>
import Snackbar from '~/components/Snackbar.vue'

export default {
  components: { Snackbar },
  ...
}
</script>

Showing the snackbar

Finally, we will create a button to show that our snackbar is working:

// ~/pages/index.vue

<template>
  ...
  <v-btn color="primary" @click="showSnackbar">
    Show snackbar
  </v-btn>
  ...
</template>

<script>
export default {
  ...
  methods: {
    showSnackbar () {
      this.$notifier.showMessage({ content: 'Hello, snackbar', color: 'info' })
    }
  }
  ...
}
</script>

Conclusion

That's it. That was easy. You will be able to call this.$notifier.showMessage(...) from everywhere without having to create a snackbar for each situation. What you could do next is allowing it to show multiples snackbars at once and add custom actions to snackbar beyond the close button. But that's all folks, if you find a better way to solve this problem, please, don't hesitate to comment.