polymer_autonotify 1.0.0-rc.10

auto notify support for Polymer 1.0

Auto notify support for (yet to be released) polymer-dart 1.0

a.k.a. : get rid of all those fancy set, add, remove, etc. calls

the problem

In polymer 1.0 you have to call a bunch of API (set and list accessor methods) on the polymer component whenever you have to apply a change on the model instead of changing the model directly. To make things worse if you have two or more independent components, for example two different views of the same model that are not inheriting the model one from the other by means of binding constructs (i.e. {{ }} or [[ ]]), then you will have to call those API on each of component.

Other then being very annoying this makes nearly impossible to follow consolidated patterns like MVC when building an app using vanilla polymer 1.0 : infact the controller (C) should always interact directly with the view (V) to update the model (M).

The opposite is true for polymer before 1.0 and that's one of the reason many appreciated that framework even though it was slower and less browser independent.

enters autonotify

This package will add support for autonotify in polymer-dart 1.0, making it possible to write your code more or less in the same way you used to do with previous polymer version.

You just have to annotate properties with @observable and extend/mixin the familiar Observable mixin, exactly like before, and polymer_autnotify will take care of calling polymer accessor API automatically for you.

To enable the autonotify feature just add the dependency to your project and add the mixin AutonotifyBehavior to your PolymerElement then annotate property with @observable (just like in the previous polymer version).

notes

Latest version of this library will not depend anymore on the old smoke mirroring system but requires a modified observe that you can find here, until the official one gets ported to reflectable or that branch gets merged.

using the transformer (optional but recommended)

Because observe transformer (the modified one to use reflectable) uses @observe annotation to mark properties to be transformed and requires a ChangeNotifier mixin while polymer-dart mirror system requires properties to be annotated by @reflectable and object to mixin JsProxy even though a unique mirror system is now being used between observe and polymer-dart it is required to annotate a class twice (and make it mixin/extend both JsProxy AND Obserable).

For example:

class ThatBeautifulModelOfMine extends Observable with JsProxy {
 @reflectable @observable String field1;
 @reflectable @observable String field2;
}

This can be annoying. Expecially if you have many of those classes around that were already annotated for observe. But don't worry! polymer_autonotify come in handy with a nice transformer that have to be run before observe transformer and that will add polymer-dart mixin and annotations for you on object already prepared for observe.

This way previous users of observe (that already have their object annotated for it) will have nothing to change to use their code with the new polymer-dart and polymer-autonotify.

In the example before one should only write:

class ThatBeautifulModelOfMine extends Observable {
 @observable String field1;
 @observable String field2;
}

If you want to use it your main pubspec.yaml should appear like this :

...


- web_components:
    entry_points:
    - web/index.html
- polymer_autonotify
- observe
- reflectable:
    entry_points:
    - web/index.dart

...

observe and polymer_autonotify transformer should also be placed in all your imported packages that exports custom polymer components using autonotify and/or exporting models object extending/mixing Observe.

Recent Changes

Current version is retro-compatible but you can now use only one behavior (i.e.: AutonotifyBehavior) instead of the two.

Added some polite tests. You can run them starting a pub serve instance and then pub run test --pub-serve=8080 -p dartium. Also in tests you can find a simple sample on how to use this feature.