Multi prompt

Divide questions/prompts into multiple sections, where the answers to each section is fed into the next in a chain.

You can furthermore feed multi prompt with a set of known answers, and the user will not be prompted to answer those questions.

Grouping answers by section

You can furthermore group answers into sections to achieve a nested answers structure. This is super useful f.ex to fill out the sections in a nested configuration such as package.json. It also allows you to use namespacing, such that prompts with the same name but in different sections don't conflict as they are merged into their own namespace.

The end result might look like this, built from 4 name prompts grouped in their own section and merged accordingly without overlap or conflict.

{
  name: 'multi-prompt',
  repository: {
    name: 'kmandrup/multi-prompt'
  },
  author: {
    name: 'kristian'
  },
  company: {
    name: 'my-company',
    url: 'my-company.com'
  }
}

No more a need to use repositoryName to distinguish and avoid conflict :)

Simply awesome!

Usage

import * as inquirer from 'inquirer'
 
import {
  multiPrompt
} from 'multi-prompt'
 
async function secondPrompt(answers: any, opts: any) {
  return [{
    type: 'input',
    name: 'type',
    default: 'tiger',
    choices: ['bird', 'tiger'],
    message: `At ${answers.age} years old you should be a`
  }]
}
 
async function firstPrompt(answers: any, opts: any) {
  // first: answers
  return [{
    type: 'input',
    name: 'firstName',
    message: 'First name', // should be humanize of name by default
    when(answers) {
      return answers.length == 0
    }
  }]
}
 
const prompts = {
  sections: {
    first: {
      // add whatever metadata
      name: 'first',
      label: 'My first section',
      // prompt is required
      prompt: firstPrompt
    },
    second: {
      name: 'second',
      prompt: secondPrompt
    }
  },
  flow: [
    'first',
    'second'
  ]
}
 
const options = {
  logOn: true, // enable detailed logging
  prompt: inquirer.prompt
  on: {
    sectionNew(section, options) {
      const { name } = section
      // write nice header for section
      chalk.cyan(`:: ${name} ::`)
    },
    sectionAnswers(section, answers, options) {
      const { name } = section
      const answered = Object.keys(answers).join(',')
      options.log(name, answers)
 
      // sum up what answers have been asked (or provided) when section is done
      chalk.green(`section ${name} received answers for ${answered}`)
    }
  }
}
 
const knownAnswers = {
  firstName: 'Kristian'
}
 
const answers = await multiPrompt(prompts, options)

Options

knownAnswers

Object containing a map of answer names and answer provided. Can be used to filter prompts asked to the user

merge

You can pass a custom merge function such as deepmerge to override the default Object.assign (flat merge)

mergeSectionAnswers

Control how answers to each section are merged into the accumulator result. This can f.ex be used to group answers by section instead of having all answers in a flat key/value structure.

You can use the exported function groupSectionAnswers to achieve this.

mergeResultWithKnownAnswers

Control how the resulting answers to all sections are merged with the set of known answers.

on

on is an object that may contain any of the following callback functions

• sectionNew(section)
• sectionCreated(section, promptsToAsk)
• sectionAnswers(section, answers)
• promptedAnswers(answersPrompted)

defaults

Advanced overrides for full control

• prompt function to prompt user
• promptDefToArray(promptDef, options) normalize to array of prompt definitions
• promptNames(promptDefList, options) names of prompts (ie. keys to be used in answers object)
• getPromptsToAsk((promptDefList, { include, exclude}, options) filter prompt list by names of known answers or whatever include/exclude is suitable
• async createPromptsToAsk({section, accAnswers, knownAnswerNames, options, defaults }) create prompts to be asked
• createLog(options) create logging function

The following is the full set of defaults you can override:

{
  createLog(options),
  log: console.log,
  error(msg, data),
  prompt: inquirer.prompt,
  promptNames(promptDefList, options),
  promptDefToArray(promptDef),
  getPromptsToAsk(promptDefList, { include, exclude} , options),
  async createPromptsToAsk({
    section,
    accAnswers,
    knownAnswerNames,
    options,
    defaults
  }),
  on // see above
}

Prompting options

This library is not limited to be used for text/CLI based prompting but is general purpose. You could integrate prompting using Voice control, use a chatbot API such as Alexa or whatever you like ;)

Fake prompts

In the test suite we use the following fakePrompt function.

function fakePrompt(promptDefList: any, options: any) {
  options.log('fakePrompt', {
    promptDefList
  })
  return promptDefList.reduce((acc: any, promptDef: any) => {
    return Object.assign(acc, {
      [promptDef.name]: promptDef.default || 'unknown'
    })
  }, {})
}

License

MIT