Overview

Back-Kit library provides a full set of W3C Web Components.

<div>
  <crud-client base-path="my-collection"></crud-client>
  <bk-table></bk-table>
</div>

Packed within a configuration file, a set of components creates a layout that can be plugged in a rendering engine, for instance a composer such as microlc-element-composer.

At runtime, when a customized configuration is injected, components are enriched with properties.

Properties may be component-specific or related to the composer. Indeed, components can receive properties concerning an authenticated user and/or a communication channel. Such channel is paramount to realize an event-driven communication amongst web components which in return provides isolation for each of them.

info

microlc-element-composer sets properties currentUser and eventBus on each rendered component, injecting respectively the authenticated user, if any, and an instance of a rxjs ReplaySubject as communication channel.

A Back-Kit component should do one thing, hence a web page header composed by a search bar, buttons and, typographies will contain the same amount of components, linked via the eventBus.

Back-Kit prefers to provide highly scoped components with fewer configuration degrees of freedom instead of large configuration options that can easily go wrong due to typos that might become really hard to investigate and debug. Thus, back-kit provides refresh-buttons, add-new-buttons, specific-task-button, in order to aim small and miss small when conceiving a configuration.

Components expose properties (set by the element-composer via JS script) and/or attributes (as the former but accessible also from the HTML document as tag attributes with camelCase syntax re-mapped to hyphen-separated-case), interact via events (messages from/to the eventBus), and instantiate a bootstrap interface.

As a rule of thumb, a component:

1. sets default values and user-provided configurations by evaluating properties/attributes
2. (may/or may not) reads the window URL to bootstrap an initial state
3. makes aware/achieves awareness of happenings onto the webpage using output/input events

After the initialization is completed, each component internal state can be modified either by the component own business logic or by an external event the component has been instructed to listen to.

Components interfacing with a given event, either listen to it or emit it. In the latter case, it requires the page to be aware, for instance, of a loading event, or that is sending data, whereas the former is referred to event-driven behavior where the component reacts to something that happened elsewhere.