Television
Television is an experimental, minimal implementation of the virtual DOM approach to view construction that aims to integrate with the web platform rather than abstract it away. This library is a thin wrapper around the virtual-dom library, and it focuses on allowing you to define HTML 5 custom elements with declarative markup. Efficient DOM access can be ensured in a manner that cooperates with other libraries by assigning an external DOM update scheduler. Other concerns, such as defining and observing a data model and listening for DOM events, are left to other libraries. The examples in this README use an embedded DSL syntax, but it should be possible to target this library with a JSX preprocessor for integrated support for HTML literals.
tv = require 'television' tvbuildTagFunctions'task-list' tvregisterElement 'task-list' : -> TaskList id: "on-deck" for task in @tasks li className: 'task' input type: 'checkbox'checked: taskdone tasktitle
In the example above, we define a task-list
element via tv.registerElement
. The prototype template we provide contains a ::render
method, which returns a virtual DOM fragment describing the view. To create an element:
taskListElement = documentcreateElement'task-list'taskListElement.tasks = title: "Write code"done: true title: "Feed cats"done: false title: "Clean room"done: falsedocumentbodyappendChildtaskListElement
To update an element:
taskListElementtaskspush title: "Do Homework"done: falsetaskListElementupdate
References
Custom elements have a refs
hash that can be populated with references to DOM nodes. Use a ref
attribute on any element in your render
method to automatically maintain a reference to its node.
tvregisterElement 'user-card' : -> UserCard img href: useravatarURLref: 'avatarImage' span userfullName userCard = documentcreateElement'user-card'userCardrefsavatarImage # --> reference to avatar image DOM element
Lifecycle Hooks
Elements registered via registerElement
can define a few lifecycle hooks:
::didCreate
Called after the element is created but before it has content.::didAttach
Called after the element is attached and rendered.::didDetach
Called after the element is detached but before its content is cleared.::readSync
Called after the element is updated. If you need to read the DOM, you can safely do so here without blocking a DOM write. Do not write to the DOM in this method!
Assigning a DOM Scheduler
You should assign a DOM update scheduler on Television that's responsible for coordinating DOM updates among all components. The scheduler should have an updateDocument
and a readDocument
method. If you're using this library within Atom, you can assign atom.views
as the scheduler:
tv = require 'television'tvsetDOMScheduleratomview
Unregistering Elements
To unregister a custom element, call .unregisterElement
on the element constructor. After doing so, you'll be able to register another element with the same name.
UserCard = tvregisterElement 'my-element' : -> MyElement"Hello World" # Later... UserCardunregisterElement
Under the hood, we dynamically reassign prototypes to make this possible, since the current DOM APIs don't support unregistering elements.