Rendering Phlex Views like Rails partials

[reeganviljoen]

It would be amazing for if Phlex Views could be rendered like partials

e.g instead of:

render Nav.new

being able to call the Phlex view like a partial

render 'nav'

The main benefit here is it would make this amazing library even more accessible to the larger Ruby on Rails community

[reeganviljoen]

@joeldrapper I was inspired by your collaboration in the larger Rails community, so I wrote a gem(still pre-release) off the back of @joelhawksley pr into Rails

I hope this can be a helpful starting point to help Phlex be more accessible to the wider community

[joeldrapper]

Hey, thanks for opening the issue. Couple of initial thoughts:

Firstly, I don’t think we should support this style render 'nav' for a few reasons:

• We already support render Nav.new (and if you don’t need to pass any arguments, render Nav).
• This style is conceptually simpler because if you understand how Ruby resolves constants, you know exactly which component will be rendered.
• Language servers such as Solargraph, RubyLSP (and RubyMine’s internal thingy) can provide autocomplete as you’re typing the constant as well as jump-to-definition.
• There is no need for any kind of string manipulation/inflection or managing our own relative constant resolution logic. Which constant does "nav" map to? We would probably need to take the current module, split it at "::" and walk up looking for matches. In the end, this would be subtly different to Ruby’s own relative constant lookup, which is lexical.
• Also, this would be a significant performance overhead without caching the resolution in a hash map, and if we did cache, we would need to invalidate that cache whenever new modules are added in places that might impact the module resolution.
• Finally, with Phlex::Kit there's also another style that is even simpler than render Nav do, render Nav.new do or render "nav" do. With Phlex::Kits, you can do just Nav do. See details of this experimental feature here. https://github.com/phlex-ruby/phlex/releases/tag/1.10.0

That said, I am interested in supporting something like render @post where there is some kind of mapping from the Post object to a component that can render that post object. I think that's more what the view component discussion was about unless I’ve missed something.

[joeldrapper]

One additional thought: Phlex’s own render method is meant to be as flexible as possible. render "nav" in Phlex (not phlex-rails) actually renders the literal text "nav". This is useful polymorphism because it allows you to create components that accept arguments that can either be provided as strings or other renderables.

If I have a component like this:

class Box < Phlex::HTML
  def initialize(content:)
    @content = content
  end

  def view_template
    div(class: "box") { render @content }
  end
end

I can render it with a component:

render Box.new(
  content: SomeOtherComponent.new
)

or a string

render Box.new(
  content: "Literally a string"
)

It also works with an enumerable of any renderable.

In phlex-rails we're hoping to support rendering strings like this and allowing you to render partials explicitly with the partial: keyword argument. See this PR https://github.com/phlex-ruby/phlex-rails/pull/149 and associated Rails issue that has so far held up this PR https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/51015

[thedumbtechguy]

That said, I am interested in supporting something like render @post where there is some kind of mapping from the Post object to a component that can render that post object. I think that's more what the view component discussion was about unless I’ve missed something.

You could do that by registering a template engine e.g. https://github.com/slim-template/slim-rails/blob/master/lib/slim-rails/register_engine.rb

[reeganviljoen]

You could do that by registering a template engine e.g. https://github.com/slim-template/slim-rails/blob/master/lib/slim-rails/register_engine.rb

@thedumbtechguy Not really, it let's you render a different template, but how do you translate @posts to PostView

That said, I am interested in supporting something like render @post where there is some kind of mapping from the Post object to a component that can render that post object. I think that's more what the view component discussion was about unless I’ve missed something

@joeldrapper I will add this functionality this weekend, I am also going to put all the other render 'modes' behind a config so you can choose what you want to use, does that sound good?

[joeldrapper]

I will add this functionality this weekend, I am also going to put all the other render 'modes' behind a config so you can choose what you want to use, does that sound good?

Being able to use render @post is something we should develop carefully with the view component team, probably sharing the same common gem and implementing the same interfaces.

I don’t know what render modes you mean. I’m not keen on introducing configuration for render modes. Instead, we have a flexible render method that can render lots of different things.

[joeldrapper]

Closing this as I don’t think any action is needed. We should probably open a new issue in the phlex-rails repo to address implicit rendering of resources (render @posts and render @post).