Alerter is a UMD JavaScript module for displaying arbitrary messaging to communicate certain states in a web app.
An Alerter() instance does two things;
- Injects alert messages along with markup templates into your page, and removes the markup when the alerts are dismissed.
- Emits events when alerts are created or dismissed.
Getting the Module
From GitHub;
- Download the latest release
Using npm;
npm install blocks-alerter
Using Bower;
- Install using the tarball URL (best option)
- Or use browserify or webpack to consume the CommonJS module
Quick Start
To get started, you'll need to include the script on your page. To create an Alerter() instance you can do;
var myAlerter = new Alerter();
You can then create an alert like this;
var myAlert = myAlerter.create({message: 'Hello!'});
And dismiss the alert like this;
myAlerter.dismiss(myAlert);
Advanced Usage
Options
There are several options available when you initialize a new Alerter() object;
prependTo
A DOM element, jQuery element, or selector string to refer to the placeholder element, where alerts will be injected. By default, alerts will be injected at the top of the <body>.
template
Out of the box, the module will generate BEM markup with the namespace alert that contains all of the markup needed to display the alert. If you want to customize the markup, you can pass in a compiled handlebars template. (Defaults to false).
Methods
Alerter.create(optionsHash)
Creates a new alert DOM object and injects it into the page via the Alerter() object. You can pass the following options in;
message(Required) this is a string with the message you want to display. You can use plain text or an HTML string with inline tags.detailThis is a string with more details related to the main message.errorsThis is an array of strings. It will be displayed as a<ul>in the default template, and can be useful for listing specific items that need to be addressed by the user.dismissableBoolean. Whether or not to display a close button on the alert. Defaults tofalse.typeis a string and allows you to choose the class of alert which can be used for CSS styling, attaching events, etc. This string will be combined with the BEM namespace and used to generate a BEM class name in the inserted markup. For example, passing'warning'as the type will result in the alert element having a class name ofalert--warning. The default isfalse, which will result in a class name ofalert.
Alerter.dismiss(alert)
When this method is called on an Alerter instance, it dismisses all alerts which originated from that instance. If you want to dismiss one specific alert, you can pass in the alert instance itself.
Events
Every instance of Alerter() will emit events when an alert is created or dismissed. You can listen for these events to assist with transitions, modal dialogs, cleanup, etc in your app.
alertCreated
Fires whenever an alert is created. Contains a payload object with the alert message and other data.
alertDismissed
Fires whenever an alert message is dismissed. Contains a payload object with the unique id of the alert that was dismissed.
Testing the Module
If you want to build and test this module yourself, you can do so by running gulp to build the module and start a server or gulp test to build the module, start a server, open a tunnel to BrowserStack and run mocha tests. Before you can run mocha tests, you'll have to define a BrowserStack key and username in /test/selenium-driver.js and BrowserStack key in /gulp/startBrowserStackTunnel.js.