Support for HTMX OOB swaps

[checketts]

I like the direction of this project. To use HTMX out-of-band swaps with Thymeleaf, I need the ability to return multiple components:

<div>my main component</div>
<div id="total">A separate component. A total perhaps</div>

Is this supportable with your library? Any tips on how that might be implemented if a PR were desired?

[tschuehly]

Hey @checketts thanks for the suggestion! You are happily invited to submit a PR.

A bit of context: Currently there are two different ways the viewcomponents are rendered. The one way where you render a nested component shouldn't be a problem because you could just insert multiple components next to each other.

<div view:component="parameterViewComponent.render(coffee, null)"></div>
<div view:component="footerViewComponent"></div>

The one that would need some investment to implement is the way where you return a ViewContext from your Controller Method -> the root component.

The ViewComponentMethodReturnValueHandler is responsible for this. It checks if a controller method returns a viewcontext and then puts that into a ModelAndViewContainer and returns that -> then the standard thymeleaf renderer takes over.

To implement multiple component returns we would need to create a new MethodReturnValueHandler that looks for a list of ViewComponents and then renders them directly into a ResponseEntity body. The code from the ViewComponentProcessor could be used. Part of it should be extracted that they render the exact same way.

I'll look at it later this weekend!

[tschuehly]

I got it working! I'll release a new version tomorrow!

[checketts]

That is great! I look forward to trying it out!

[tschuehly]

Hey @checketts I just released version v0.4.2 you can grab from jitpack. I updated the docs and published an example

Please try it out and give me feedback!