Our great sponsors
-
We begin by defining a schema for the loader options so we can validate them with schema-utils. The schema is an object that describes properties that you can set when you integrate the loader in your webpack config:
-
Obtain the loader options by calling getOptions(loaderContext), which is a function provided by loader-utils. We default the return value of getOptions to an empty object literal in case the webpack config doesn't include the options hash.
-
SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
-
Parse the source string. We're using js-yaml for this.
-
webpack
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows for loading parts of the application on demand. Through "loaders", modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
One of our internal tools at RedBit uses yaml to provide structured data. We chose yaml because it's more human-friendly than json, and the data in question is created and modified by humans during development. Applications need to consume the data as JavaScript objects, so we need to convert it from yaml to json. We could do the conversion at runtime but that would affect performance, possibly to the point of degrading the user experience. Instead, we chose to convert the data during the build process, which is controlled by webpack. This required a custom webpack loader. I won't describe the implementation of our internal tool in detail because it wouldn't be particularly helpful or relevant. Instead, I'll show you how to build a simple yaml loader that you can modify to suit your own needs.
