Considerations for moving this beyond an experiment?

[tmlayton]

@ssorallen continuation from rails/turbolinks#491

[qq99]

I think the following should happen:

• [ ] Turbolinks PR to expose Turbolinks.replaceNode(...) as the public API, so a monkey patch of the DOM isn't needed here https://github.com/ssorallen/turbo-react/blob/e0048b78d2c915d0517efff1afdf9c6cf7b6ca75/src/reactize.js#L54
• [x] https://github.com/ssorallen/turbo-react/blob/e0048b78d2c915d0517efff1afdf9c6cf7b6ca75/src/reactize.js#L24-L30 should be changed to call the original Turbolinks.replaceNode(...)

[ssorallen]

• TurboReact currently includes Turbolinks, but I don't think it should. This is essentialy a Turbolinks plugin, so it should have Turbolinks as one of its peerDependencies at best. (#18)
• Tlinks 3.0 has partial replacement, which might be enough API to fix the need for monkeypatching replaceNode. It needs some more investigation.

[ssorallen]

• TurboReact has to disable the Turboinks page cache because it otherwise caches React's version of the DOM with data-react-id attributes. Diff'ing doesn't work after that because the existence of those attrs makes React treat the DOM as a pre-rendered document. Unsure if there are enough hooks to circumvent that?

[qq99]

TurboReact currently includes Turbolinks, but I don't think it should

agreed 100% :) also, it'd be very nice if it were available as a rails engine

[ssorallen]

@qq99, I'm familiar with Rails but not with writing Rails engines. I can check that out too.

[ssorallen]

https://github.com/ssorallen/turbo-react/blob/e0048b78d2c915d0517efff1afdf9c6cf7b6ca75/src/reactize.js#L24-L30 should be changed to call the original Turbolinks.replaceNode(...)

I took that suggestion and implemented it in commit https://github.com/ssorallen/turbo-react/commit/2ffd0311ee6c0b1f3fc3be50f8a5914e41fe562f.

[nateberkopec]

What would making TurboReact a Rails engine solve? Happy to take a stab at it but I don't understand the benefit.

[qq99]

It let's you install it more like:

1. gem 'turboreact' into your Gemfile
2. #= require turboreact in your application.js manifest
3. It's all working and good-to-go

It seems a bit strange to have to use npm to install something in a RoR project

[ssorallen]

:+1: @qq99, if you are familiar with Rails Engines a "turboreact-rails" Gem would be great. I agree using NPM in a Rails project feels awkward.

[jbhatab]

So is this suitable for production? The only thing that threw me off was the caching of react ids. Seems like it could break stuff.

[ssorallen]

@jbhatab TurboReact currently disables the Turbolinks cache because of the problem of caching React IDs.

The library doesn't have automated testing yet, but if it runs into any problems it falls back to letting Turbolinks work like normal. If you are comfortable with document.replaceChild being monkeypatched, feel free to try it out.