turbo

I love Marco's turbo_power library for adding some extra actions to turbo. For example the turbo_frame_reload which should reload a given turbo frame.

But the turbo_frame_reload didn't work in my situation.

I've got an index view which renders all orders in a turbo-frame (with pagination).
Pressing a button next to an order should tag the order and reload the orders page.
Tagging is an action in other controller, which doesn't know anything about this order screen. But after tagging it should refresh the turbo frame with the orders.

I thought this could be easy by refreshing the turbo_frame with a turbo_stream action turbo_frame_reload. This only works if the frame has a src attribute in it.

When I set src on the this frame I get the error: element has a source URL which references itself. So this isn't working.

Workaround I created for now is the following.

I add an extra turbo_stream action named: turbo_frame_reload_with_data. This sets the source on the attribute data-src when the src attribute is empty/missing. (that's on the initial load).

So define the turboframe like this:

<%= turbo_frame_tag :orders, data_src: request.original_url do %>
.. content .. 
<% end %>

To make this work the following code is added to the application.js, adding a custom turbo-stream action.
This action sets the src of the turbo-frame when a turbo_frame_reload_with_data action is invoked

Turbo.StreamActions.turbo_frame_reload_with_data = function() {
  this.targetElements.forEach((element) => {
    let src = element.getAttribute('src') || element.getAttribute('data-src')
    element.src = ''
    element.src = src
  })
}

Note: Always setting src with data-src doesn't work. The data-src isn't updated on turbo-frame updates, only the src-flag is.

To make the rails experience nicer, a helper is added to the turbo_stream tag builder.

module TurboStreamActionsHelper
  def turbo_frame_reload_with_data(target = nil, **attributes)
  custom_action :turbo_frame_reload_with_data, target:, attributes:
  end
end
Turbo::Streams::TagBuilder.prepend(TurboStreamActionsHelper)

In the controller performing the action, I render the following turbo-stream action. To refresh after this, the following can be returend.

render turbo_stream: turbo_stream.turbo_frame_reload_with_data('orders'),

References

https://marcoroth.dev/posts/guide-to-custom-turbo-stream-actions

Yesterday I've added turbo/hotwire to a big rails application which evolved over several years from rails 3, to 4 to 5 to 6 and now to rails 7.

The 6-7 version updates went pretty smooth. But now we would like to rewrite our javascript-coffeescript kruft to a more modern approach.

The app is very big, so directly replacing everything is virtually impossible. That's why I introduced an incremental approach.

The 7 version is still running sprockets. (Glad I didn't introduce webpacker in version 6, which would have resulted in an even bigger kruft).

New situation

The new situation will keep sprockets for the current javascript/coffeescript, sass css and other assets.

It will introduce esbuild for building the new javascript.

The directory structure used is the following:

app/assets/builds: is the output folder of esbuild javascripts
app/assets/javascripts: contains the legacy scripts
app/javascript: contains the new javascripts

Changes in Gemfile

- gem uglifier
+ gem terser 

+ gem turbo-rails
+ jsbundling-rails
+ stimulus-rails

Configure sprockets / deployment

Sprockets needs to to include the esbuild build directory to embed the new javascript content.
Changes in app/assets/config/manifest.js

+//= link_tree ../build/

Add the build directory to the assets paths in config/initializers/assets.rb

Rails.application.config.assets.paths << Rails.root.join('app/assets/builds')

Uglifier was crashing on production deployment of the esbuild javascript files (those are already handled). This was solved be replacing uglifier with terser in my Gemfile.

This also needs to be enabled in the config/environments/production.rb file.

- config.assets.js_compressor = Uglifier.new(harmony: true)
+ config.assets.js_compressor = :terser

Required legacy javascript changes

Every legacy javascript file that uses the ready eventhandler is replaced by the turbo:load event

- $(document).ready ->
+$(document).on "turbo:load", ->

New javacript changes

The new new javascript files cannot be called application.js because it has the same name as the legacy name. Because the same name is generated to solve this, I use app/javascript/app.js:

// Entry point for the build script in your package.json

import { Turbo } from "@hotwired/turbo-rails"
window.Turbo = Turbo

import "./controllers"

Contents of app/javascript/controllers/index.js

// This file is auto-generated by ./bin/rails stimulus:manifest:update
// Run that command whenever you add a new controller or create them with
// ./bin/rails generate stimulus controllerName

import { application } from "./application"

import LegacyJsController from "./legacy_js_controller"
application.register("legacy-js", LegacyJsController)

Load the new javascripts

Add the new javascript include to the layout template of the project and `views/layouts/application.html.erb'

= <%= javascript_include_tag "application", defer: true %>
+ <%= javascript_include_tag "app", defer: true %>

- <body>
+ <body 'data-turbo'= <%= @turbo ? true : false %>' >

Because Turbo requires 422 status code on invalid form result, I've disabled Turbo by default. I've tried enabling it by default, which worked pretty good except for form-validation errors. And there are a LOT of places this happen, so for the incremental update it's better to slowly convert/change all pages for using turbo.

When a controller-action uses turbo it can set the @turbo variable to true.
The idea it to slowly introduce this to every controller. When I'm confident it works (almost) everywhere this can be inverted/removed.

Add hotwire/turbo to the package.json file

Contents of package.json

{
 "name": "projectname",
 "private": true,
 "dependencies": {
   "@hotwired/stimulus": "^3.0",
   "@hotwired/turbo-rails": "^7.3.0",
   "esbuild": "^0.17.11"
 },
 "scripts": {
   "build": "esbuild app/javascript/*.* --bundle --sourcemap --outdir=app/assets/builds --public-path=assets"
 },
 "version": "0.1.0"
}

(Build with yarn)

Running the app

Running the app now happens via bin/dev which uses Foreman so esbuild automaticly builds the new javascript:

web: unset PORT && bin/rails server
js: yarn build --watch

How it is going

Currently I'm slowly moving legacy javascript methods to stimulus controllers.
Specialised autocomplete-inputs, select2 inputs are converted ony by one to stimulus controllers.

My experience is that simulus is very good in auto-enabling inputs on loading ajax content.
Even my legacy html-updates via ajax are updated by stimulus when they are introduced into the DOM.
I really like this solution, it's possible to keep the old legacy javascript running and build new things with the turbo/stimulus approach

Turbo Frame Reload Error: “element has a source URL which references itself”