Kilt Components

The goal of this library is to support a modular component library of ever nested templated components, to generate a static page that can be built from building block components.

This library uses Kilt as the underlying templating engine, and so Kilt supported templating languages should also be supported by this library. However, only ECR, Slang, Liquid, and Water have been tested so far.

Installation

1. Add the dependency to your shard.yml:

   dependencies:
     kilt-components:
       github: vici37/kilt-components
   

2. Run shards install

Usage

Start with a directory of components, where each subdirectory is considered one component. Each component directory contains two files, one being the crystal controller and the other being a template for the view of that component. Using the spec component library as an example:

spec/fixture1/namespace
├── list
│ ├── list.cr
│ └── list.water
├── root
│ ├── root.cr
│ └── root.ecr
├── section
│ ├── section.cr
│ └── section.slang
├── text
|   ├── text.cr
|   └── text.liquid
└── component_list
    ├── component_list.cr
    └── component_list.liquid

require "kilt-components"

# This macro will import all components at this location.
# Folder path passed in is the relative location to the root of all components
Kilt::Component.import_components("spec/fixture1")

rendered = KiltComponentSpec::Root.new("My Project", "Summary of project").render

The initial root.ecr looks like:

# <%= @name %>
--------------

<%= @summary %>

<%= namespace_section("Description", "details").render %>

<%= namespace_list(items).render %>

<%= namespace_component_list([namespace_text("This is text"), namespace_text("This is more text")]).render %>

And the rendered string is now:

# My Project
--------------

Summary of project

<h3>Description</h3>
details

<ul>
  <li>item1</li>
  <li>item2</li>
  <li>???</li>
  <li>Profit</li>
</ul>

This is text
This is more text

Every component is accessible to every other component through injected methods that wrap the constructor and a newly added render method. I.e. for component root above to access the list component, it would use the method namespace_list(["item1", "item2", "etc"]), which will return an instance of the component as if constructed through its new method with whatever parameters are passed in. If a direct render is desired, you can instead call render_namespace_list(...).

Blocks (or Slots)

New convenience methods were added so that blocks can be forwarded to the constructor of components that wish to wrap sub content on the fly. These blocks are referred to as slots for the components:

# namespace/blocked_component.cr
class Blocked
  include Kilt::Component

  has_slot
end

# namespace/blocked_component.slang
div.my-class
  == render_slot # This raises an exception if the slot wasn't filled
  == render_slot? # if no block is provided, this returns an empty string instead

# namespace/some_other_component.slang
== render_namespace_blocked_component do
  p This is a paragraph rendered in a div with css "my-class"

Renders into:

<div class="my-class">
  <p>This is a paragraph rendered in a div with css "my-class"</p>
</div>

Features

• Supports any templating language supported by kilt
• Stitches together component templates to allow component re-use
• Exceptions thrown by a component correctly point to the component file
• All components have a namespace
• Convenience methods to construct components with their arguments, supports blocks

Contributors

• Troy Sornson - creator and maintainer