Components

Components are another option for reusable building blocks of your Enhance application. They are single file components wrapping your HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a portable web component. Components live in the app/components/ folder in Enhance projects.

Naming

The tag name of your component is determined by its file name. Meaning app/components/my-card.mjs will be authored as <my-card></my-card> in your HTML page. Enhance components are HTML custom elements, so they require two or more words separated by a dash.

app/components/my-message → <my-message></my-message>
app/components/my-link → <my-link></my-link>

When a project grows to include more components than can comfortably fit in a single folder, they can be divided into sub-directories inside app/components/. The folder name becomes part of the custom element tag name:

app/components/blog/comment → <blog-comment></blog-comment>
app/components/blog/comment-form → <blog-comment-form></blog-comment-form>

@enhance/custom-element

Components are web components — meaning: they extend HTMLElement like vanilla web components and provide you all the lifecycle methods you would expect (connectedCallback, disconnectedCallback, adoptedCallback, and attributeChangedCallback).

When you write an Enhance component you will extend the CustomElement class from the @enhance/custom-element package. These single file components allow you to take advantage of slotting and style scoping in the light DOM while avoiding some of the issues the shadow DOM creates.

import CustomElement from '@enhance/custom-element'

export default class MyCard extends CustomElement {
  connectedCallback() {
    this.heading = this.querySelector('h5')
  }

  render({ html, state }) {
    const { attrs={} } = state
    const { title='default' } = attrs
    return html`
      <style>
        :host {
            position: relative;
            display: flex;
            flex-direction: column;
            min-width: 0;
            word-wrap: break-word;
            color: black;
            background-color: #fff;
            background-clip: border-box;
            border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.125);
            border-radius: 0.25rem;
        }
        .card-img {
            width: 100%;
            border-top-left-radius: calc(0.25rem - 1px);
            border-top-right-radius: calc(0.25rem - 1px);
        }
        .card-body {
            flex: 1 1 auto;
            padding: 1.25rem;
        }
        .card-title {
            margin-bottom: 0.75rem;
            font-size: 1.25rem;
            font-weight: 500;
        }
      </style>
      <slot name="image"></slot>
      <div class="card-body font-sans">
        <h5 class="card-title">${title}</h5>
        <slot></slot>
      </div>
    `
  }

  static get observedAttributes() {
    return [ 'title' ]
  }

  titleChanged(value) {
    this.heading.textContent = value
  }
}

customElements.define('my-card', MyCard)

You may be thinking that the render function looks familiar and you would be right. These render functions are Enhance Elements. This enables us to share rendering logic between the client side and server side so any Enhance Component will be server side renderable.

When an Enhance component is server-side rendered it is “enhanced” with an attribute to indicate that the slotting algorithm and style transform have already been run. The attribute look like this:

<my-card enhanced=”✨”></my-card>

The client-side code will look for this attribute and only run if your component hasn’t already been “enhanced”. Thus avoiding an unnecessary render pass.

If you have an existing Enhance Element you can always import it into your Component and use it as your render function.

UI Updates

Updates to Enhance Components are triggered by attribute changes. Any change to an attribute listed in the observedAttributes will trigger a <attribute name>Changed method. For example if you are observing the title attribute of our my-card component any time that attribute value is updated the titleChanged method will be executed. This enables you to write surgical DOM updates which will always be the most performant way to update your page.

DOM Diffing

Other frameworks supply a DOM diffing solution, and Enhance Components are no different. However, we believe DOM diffing should be enabled on an opt-in basis. To enable DOM diffing in our my-card component, we will add the MorphdomMixin class from @enhance/morphdom-mixin.

import CustomElement from '@enhance/custom-element'
import MorphdomMixin from '@enhance/morphdom-mixin'

export default class MyCard extends MorphdomMixin(CustomElement) {
  render({ html, state }) {
    const { attrs={} } = state
    const { title='default' } = attrs
    return html`
      <style>
        :host {
            position: relative;
            display: flex;
            flex-direction: column;
            min-width: 0;
            word-wrap: break-word;
            color: black;
            background-color: #fff;
            background-clip: border-box;
            border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.125);
            border-radius: 0.25rem;
        }
        .card-img {
            width: 100%;
            border-top-left-radius: calc(0.25rem - 1px);
            border-top-right-radius: calc(0.25rem - 1px);
        }
        .card-body {
            flex: 1 1 auto;
            padding: 1.25rem;
        }
        .card-title {
            margin-bottom: 0.75rem;
            font-size: 1.25rem;
            font-weight: 500;
        }
      </style>
      <slot name="image"></slot>
      <div class="card-body font-sans">
        <h5 class="card-title">${title}</h5>
        <slot></slot>
      </div>
    `
  }

  static get observedAttributes() {
    return [ 'title' ]
  }
}

customElements.define('my-card', MyCard)

Once added the MorphdomMixin will handle updating the DOM whenever an observedAttributes is modified. The <attribute name>Changed methods are no longer necessary. Instead on an attribute change the render method will be re-run and the output will be compared against the current DOM. Only the modified DOM nodes will be updated.

ℹ️

morphdom does string based diffing on the actual HTML element and not a virtual DOM diff so every element you want compared needs to have a string change or unique id.

⚠️

Lists

When working with lists of data in the DOM it is highly advisable to add a unique attribute to the list item like an id or key. This will assist morphdom in determining what items have changed in the list.

Reducing Boilerplate

Many other web components provide a way of reducing the amount of boilerplate code one needs to write. Enhance provides the @enhance/element package which builds upon the CustomElement and MorphdomMixin classes while providing a more succinct way of writing Enhance Components.

Revisiting our my-card component we get:

import enhance from '@enhance/element'

const MyCard = {
  attrs: [ 'title' ],
  init(element) {
    console.log('My Card: ', element)
  },
  render({ html, state }) {
    const { attrs={} } = state
    const { title='default' } = attrs
    return html`
      <style>
        :host {
            position: relative;
            display: flex;
            flex-direction: column;
            min-width: 0;
            word-wrap: break-word;
            color: black;
            background-color: #fff;
            background-clip: border-box;
            border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.125);
            border-radius: 0.25rem;
        }
        .card-img {
            width: 100%;
            border-top-left-radius: calc(0.25rem - 1px);
            border-top-right-radius: calc(0.25rem - 1px);
        }
        .card-body {
            flex: 1 1 auto;
            padding: 1.25rem;
        }
        .card-title {
            margin-bottom: 0.75rem;
            font-size: 1.25rem;
            font-weight: 500;
        }
      </style>
      <slot name="image"></slot>
      <div class="card-body font-sans">
        <h5 class="card-title">${title}</h5>
        <slot></slot>
      </div>
    `
  },
  connected() {
    console.log('CONNECTED')
  },
  disconnected() {
    console.log('DISCONNECTED')
  }
}

enhance("my-card", MyCard);
export default MyCard

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