Heterogeneous Lists

b8r's demo site uses a heterogeneous list to display source files with embedded documentation, tests, and examples

One of the things I wanted to implement in bindinator was heterogeneous lists, i.e. lists of things that aren't all the same. Typically, this is implemented by creating homogeneous lists and then subclassing the list element, even though the individual list elements may have nothing more in common with one another than the fact that, for the moment, they're in the same list.

This ended up being pretty easy to implement in two different ways.

The first thing I tried was a effectively an empty (as in no markup) "router" component. Instead of binding the list to a superclass component, you bind to a content-free component (code, no content) which figures out which component you really want programmatically (so it can be arbitrarily complex) and inserts one of those over itself. This is a satisfactory option because it handles both simple cases and complex cases quite nicely, and didn't actually touch the core of bindinator.

Here's the file-viewer code in its entirety:

<script>
    switch (data.file_type || data.url.split('.').pop()) {
        case 'md':
        case 'markdown':
            b8r.component('components/markdown-viewer').then(viewer => {
                b8r.insertComponent(viewer, component, data);
            });
            break;

        case 'text':
            b8r.component('components/text-viewer').then(viewer => {
                b8r.insertComponent(viewer, component, data);
            });
            break;

        case 'js':
            b8r.component('components/literate-js-viewer').then(viewer => {
                b8r.insertComponent(viewer, component, data);
            });
            break;
    }
</script>

(I should note that this router is not used for a list in the demo site, since the next approach turned out to meet the specific needs for the demo site.)

The example of this approach in the demo code is the file viewer (used to display markdown, source files, and so on). You pass it a file and it figures out what type of file it is from the file type and then picks the appropriate viewer component to display it with. In turn this means that a PNG viewer, say, need have nothing in common with a markdown viewer, or an SVG viewer. Or, to put it another way, we can use a standalone viewer component directly, rather than creating a special list component and mixing-in or subclassing the necessary stuff in.

You'll note that this case is pretty trivial — we're making a selection based directly on the file_type property, and I thought it should be necessary to use a component or write any code for such a simple case.

The second approach was that I added a toTarget called component_map that let you pick a component based on the value of a property. This maps onto a common JSON pattern where you have a heterogeneous array of elements, each of which has a common property (such as "type"). In essence, it's a toTarget that acts like a simple switch statement, complete with allowing a default option.

The example of this in the demo app is the source code viewer which breaks up a source file into a list of different kinds of things (source code snippets, markdown fragments, tests, and demos). These in turn are rendered with appropriate components.

This is what a component_map looks like in action:

<div
  data-list="_component_.parts"
  data-bind="component_map(
    js:js-viewer|
    markdown:markdown-viewer|
    component:fiddle|
    test:test
  )=.type"
>
  <div data-component="loading"></div>
</div>

From my perspective, both of these seem like pretty clean and simple implementations of a common requirement. The only strike against component_map is obviousness, and in particular the quasi-magical difference between binding to component.parts vs. .type, which makes me think that while the latter is convenient to type, forcing the programmer to explicitly bind to instance.type might be clearer in the long run.

P.S.

Anyone know of a nice way to embed code in blog posts in Wordpress? All I can find are tools for embedding hacks in wordpress.