you can find source code for this post here:
AngelMunoz / tun-stencil-sample
A Sample for Stencil Website, that can be exported as a component library also
Stencil App Starter
Stencil is a compiler for building fast web apps using Web Components.
Stencil combines the best concepts of the most popular frontend frameworks into a compile-time rather than run-time tool. Stencil takes TypeScript, JSX, a tiny virtual DOM layer, efficient one-way data binding, an asynchronous rendering pipeline (similar to React Fiber), and lazy-loading out of the box, and generates 100% standards-based Web Components that run in any browser supporting the Custom Elements v1 spec.
Stencil components are just Web Components, so they work in any major framework or with no framework at all. In many cases, Stencil can be used as a drop in replacement for traditional frontend frameworks given the capabilities now available in the browser, though using it as such is certainly not required.
Stencil also enables a number of key capabilities on top of Web Components, in particular Server Side Rendering (SSR) without the…
and
Stackblitz Antularjs Template With Stencil Components
also the website is published in this place
In the last Post I shared with you that stencil is a Web Components Compiler
focused on Custom Elements
which uses TSX
and other reactjs
inspired technology
Yesterday I decided to make some public stuff so you could see what I was talking about and I kind of took it a little further deploying a website to firebase
and also publishing the same website on npm
and then use the components on the website to share and use in other website/project.
Let me tell you that I was Amazed with the results, but let's get started with forms first, because that's what I promised on the last post
Forms and Events
In src/components you will find three components
- tun-data-form
- tun-profile-form
- tun-navbar
From those 3, tun-navbar
is badly designed for sharing, because it has implicit and explicit data from the web application itself (like routes exclusively for the website itself) it's like that on semi purpose (I didn't think it was going to be easy to share at all) but it's a gotcha you can already see when working with shareable website components in stencil, you could replace those routes with slots or even properties in a way that the component isn't depending on your website at all, but allow it to be extensible.
The other two components are mere forms without a specific purpose, they exist just to show how to do stuff in stencil rather than make a website work.
In Frameworks
like Vue
or Aurelia
I like to work with top -> down
communication, and then producing events in children elements with listeners In their parents that way I can use the same component in different context as long as that context has the same properties and similar meaning.
In the case of tun-data-form
we use it like this in the forms page
<section>
<h1>Data Form</h1>
<tun-data-form edit={this.editData}></tun-data-form>
</section>
we're passing down a Boolean value to know if we can edit data, some websites, display information almost ready to edit but we need a click on a switch/button else where to allow us edit information, we're just following that in here.
In tun-data-form we can see quite a lot of code but let's go step by step
import { Component, Prop, Event, EventEmitter, State } from '@stencil/core';
@Component({
tag: 'tun-data-form',
styleUrl: 'tun-data-form.scss'
})
export class TunDataForm {
@Prop() edit: boolean = false;
@Event() submitDataForm: EventEmitter;
@Event() resetDataForm: EventEmitter;
@State() email: string;
@State() phoneNumber: string;
@State() password: string;
on the first line, we import what we will be using on our component, the following code specifies where to find our custom styles and which tag will be using for this component.
On the next line we have our class declaration and start looking at some code
we have the following decorators
- Prop
- Event
- State
Prop
is a decorator that lets us specify that the marked class
property will be coming from the outside of the component
<tun-data-form edit={this.editData}></tun-data-form>
in this case, it is that edit
property that we used before on forms.tsx
, the difference from Prop
and State
is that props are by default one way
binded and can't be modified by the component itself.
Event
is a decorator that will allow us to send events to the exterior of the component in a way that can eventually be captured as in a usual form element.addEventListener('submitDataForm',() => {}, false)
State
is a decorator that tells our component that class
properties marked with this, will be used internally in the component and that they don't need to be exposed.
Then we have our render function
render() {
return (
<form onSubmit={this.onSubmit.bind(this)} onReset={this.onReset.bind(this)}>
<article class='columns is-multiline'>
<section class='column is-half'>
<section class='field'>
<label class='label'>Email</label>
<p class='control'>
<input type='email' class='input' name='email'
onInput={this.onInput.bind(this)} readOnly={!this.edit} required />
</p>
</section>
</section>
<section class='column is-half'>
<section class='field'>
<label class='label'>Password</label>
<p class='control'>
<input type='password' class='input' name='password'
onInput={this.onInput.bind(this)} readOnly={!this.edit} required />
</p>
</section>
</section>
<section class='column is-two-thirds'>
<section class='field'>
<label class='label'>Phone Number</label>
<p class='control'>
<input type='tel' class='input' name='phoneNumber'
onInput={this.onInput.bind(this)}
readOnly={!this.edit} pattern='[+0-9]{3}[- ][0-9]{3}[- ][0-9]{3}[- ][0-9]{2}[- ][0-9]{2}' required />
</p>
</section>
</section>
</article>
{this.edit ? <button class='button is-info is-outlined' type='submit'>Change</button> : <span></span>}
{this.edit ? <button class='button is-primary is-outlined' type='reset'>Cancel</button> : <span></span>}
</form>
);
}
which as you guess is your typical markup code, the only code that might be relevant for the purpose of this post is these lines
onSubmit={this.onSubmit.bind(this)} onReset={this.onReset.bind(this)}
onInput={this.onInput.bind(this)} readOnly={!this.edit}
We're dealing with events here and setting properties on events, we bind some functions that are part of the class ahead in the code
this relates similarly to onclick="myfn()"
and the last relevant code:
onSubmit(event: Event) {
event.preventDefault();
this.submitDataForm.emit({
email: this.email,
phoneNumber: this.phoneNumber,
password: this.password
});
}
onReset() {
this.resetDataForm.emit();
}
(for the usage of the onInput
function please check the last post)
In this part we lastly use this.submitDataForm
and this.resetDataForm
which are the class
properties we marked as @Event
earlier, these are just sintactic sugar for the following
const event = new CustomEvent('submitDataForm', {
detail: {
email: this.email,
phoneNumber: this.phoneNumber,
password: this.password
}
})
document.querySelector('tun-data-form').dispatchEvent(event);
in the end We're still #UsingThePlatform just take in mind that everything on the methods, functions etc is tied to your logic and such, but the least a component depends on something, the more portable it is
now I should be able to use this form component wherever I want, if I find fit I can also pass a property which may contain everything I need to fill those fields before using it that's just up to usage
now If we go to the forms page, there will be a method with another decorator we haven't seen yet @Listen()
@Listen('submitDataForm')
onSubmitDataForm({ detail: { email, password, phoneNumber }, }: CustomEvent) {
console.log(email, password, phoneNumber);
}
@Listen('resetDataForm')
onResetDataForm() {
this.editData = false;
}
Listen
is a decorator that is sugar over
document.querySelector('tun-data-form')
.addEventListener('submitDataForm', function onSubmitDataForm({}) {});
it may look like Stencil is declaring stuff somewhere and adding itself to window in some way but no, this is totally just javascript under the hood, just browser API's and nothing more, we're not using any kind of framework
or framework
specific methods, functions; It's just the browser environment with it's API's
The code here is fairly simple, it's just Listening to the submitDataForm
custom event that we fired (.emit()
) in the tun-data-form component as you can see, the properties we sent in our emit, now are available on our detail
property of our Custom Event having these emited, we can now start doing ajax stuff, either sending it to our API, processing it somewhere, storing it on Local Storage, whatever you want/need to do with that information
Bonus
So far we have a form that doesn't depend on custom business logic, it's job is just about collecting data, and emitting that data for a parent component to manage the business logic for it. What if we decide that we have other application that should use the same component? but meh, it's on angularjs I bet it won't work.
Wrong! head to this place to see how the form is performing and how it seems to work, pleas open the console and see that we're logging what we get from our custom events we fired.
I have published the same repository in NPM with the help of these Docs
and also with the help of unpkg, and created this stackblitz where I wanted to use the forms I created for my website
(you can try that too https://unpkg.com/tun-stencil-sample@0.0.1/dist/tun-stencil-sample.js
)
Now Pay attention because, this blew my mind once I realized what was going on here
in the index.html we have the following code
<div id="app">
<div ui-view></div>
<hr>
<h1>Don't forget to check the console</h1>
<tun-profile-form edit></tun-profile-form>
<hr>
<tun-data-form edit></tun-data-form>
</div>
those are the same forms we created in our previous website! NO MODIFICATIONS :super_ultra_crazy_mega_parrot_ever:
you will need to add/remove manually the edit
property for the moment, but on the right side you can see how it is working equally to the website you visited before!
yeah but event handling must be hard right?
Wrong! head to app.js
and you will see at the end the following lines
document.querySelector('tun-data-form')
.addEventListener('submitDataForm', event => console.log(event.detail), false);
document.querySelector('tun-profile-form')
.addEventListener('submitTunProfile', event => console.log(event.detail), false);
whaaat? I mean just that? that means that if I'm using Aurelia I would be doing <tun-data-form submit-tun-profile.bind="myFn($event)"><tun-data-form>
If I'm using Vue it would be <tun-data-form @submit-tun-profile="myFn"><tun-data-form>
and that is Just Awesome! I haven't personally tried it but hey, did you check that the template is actually using Angular Js
? and let's be fair angularjs isn't the most outsider friendly framework out there and I have tested some compiled polymer web components
previously in Vue and they worked just fine so I'm completely sure Stencil will work too.
My head was blown off yesterday when I was finishing doing this, it only took a couple of hours! not days, not weeks, not months, just a couple of hours for the Maximum Portability
I've ever seen.
My heart has been taken by Stencil and I can not express how much interested and amazed I'm at the work of the Ionic Team that made all this work possible in a way that is not only intuitive but without that extra bunch, frameworks often put in.
Lastly I wanted to share a video from last year when they first presented Stencil at the last year's Polymer Summit 2017
Thank you for reading this mess of a post, and please share your thoughts on the comments below! also any feedback on the code I have share with you is pretty much appreciated, I'm not a heavy user of tsx/jsx so there might be some patterns that are not great at all.
Top comments (7)
Looks good but somehow your code throws compiler error with latest version of Stencil.
Thanks would you be kind to tell me where? I started the project with the stencil cli and is published already
I don't have stencil cli I did npm run build and got this error.
You can check my fork here github.com/Kiho/tun-stencil-sample
[ ERROR ] TypeError: Parameter "url" must be a string, not undefined at Url.parse (url.js:103:11) at Object.urlParse
as parse at getWritePathFromUrl
(D:\Work\stencil\tun-stencil-sample\node_modules\@stencil\core\dist\compiler\index.js:7708:38) at
D:\Work\stencil\tun-stencil-sample\node_modules\@stencil\core\dist\compiler\index.js:13945:26 at
Generator.next () at
D:\Work\stencil\tun-stencil-sample\node_modules\@stencil\core\dist\compiler\index.js:13815:71 at new Promise
() at __awaiter$E
(D:\Work\stencil\tun-stencil-sample\node_modules\@stencil\core\dist\compiler\index.js:13811:12) at
writePrerenderDest
(D:\Work\stencil\tun-stencil-sample\node_modules\@stencil\core\dist\compiler\index.js:13943:12) at
D:\Work\stencil\tun-stencil-sample\node_modules\@stencil\core\dist\compiler\index.js:13929:19
Let me take a look at it and I'll get back to you
There is an issue on GitHub about this, I'll try to keep you posted
github.com/ionic-team/stencil/issu...
It's compiled Stencil though, right? Found this article while trying to work out how to use Stackblitz to make the Stencil components in the first place. Because I was interested in using 'Turbo' to build Stencil faster than compiling locally.
yup, these ones use the stencil CLI to compile the web components