stimulus-use VS view_component

You can see that I added a dependency here: stimulus-use.

“stimulus-use: Add composable behaviors to your Stimulus controllers, like debouncing, detecting outside clicks and many other things.

Actually, Stimulus is pretty cool because you can compose multiple pre-built behaviors into one Stimulus controller, for a sort of functional approach to component behaviors. The tradeoff is that a growing web of Stimulus controllers (plus HTML data attributes associated with them) can become complex and hard to understand.

The stimulus-use project is a collection of reusable behaviors for Stimulus. If you are familiar with React, this project is similar to React’s hooks system, but for Stimulus controllers.

To make using the IntersectionObserver API easier, we will add the wonderful stimulus-use package to our application. This is not a requirement, but it does simplify the code a bit.

Finally, as we recently added the Stimulus-Use library to our project, we made sure to upgrade it to current beta which supports Stimulus 3.

As you’ll see below, I am importing useClickOutside from stimulus-use, it’s a great library with small, composable helpers, I urge you to check it out!

For example, we have a few ”live search“ fields, backed by back-end Fetch requests, on some pages. The live search function was usually triggered by the keyup event and Cuprite was such a fast typewriter that it frequently sent multiple requests almost at once. If some of the responses got a bit late or out of sync, the front-end JavaScript code began hitting issues. We solved this by adopting a technique called debouncing and, frankly, we should have done this since the beginning. By the way, we used the useDebounce module from the marvelous Stimulus-use library to achieve this.

When searching for examples of table components built with the ViewComponent gem, I was surprised to find none. After some inquiries, I came across examples that worked like this:

View components offer two primary ways to interact with the component: passing arguments to the initializer and using slots:

For example, splitting out views into partials? Or the new ViewComponent feature that's becoming quite popular - https://viewcomponent.org/

I used to do "pure ruby" approach to that -- but basically wound up realizing I was re-inventing github's view_component. Their design goals were similar enough to what I was trying to do, that it made more sense just to use that, rather than try to re-invent it myself.

ViewComponent

The linked one is my Rails implementation, written for ViewComponent. The official version uses Nunjucks.