Open Event Front-end project is built using Ember JS, which lets us create modular components. While implementing the sessions route on the project, we faced a challenge of sending inter-component actions. To solve this problem we used the ember action helpers which bubbles up the action to the controller and sends it to the desired component. How did we solve it?

Handling actions in ember

In ember we can handle actions using the {{action ‘function’}} where function executes every time an action on element is triggered. This can be used to handle actions for the component. You can define actions for elements as:

<a href="#" class="item {{if (eq selectedTrackId track.id) 'active'}}" {{action 'filter' track.id}}>
  {{track.name}}
</a>

All the actions defined using the {{action}}  helper are defined inside the actions section of the component. Here the action filter is getting binded to onClick event of the anchor tag. The above helper will pass the name of the track(track) as a parameter to the filter function defined in the component.

Whenever the element is clicked the filter function defined in the component will get triggered. This method works for handling actions within a component, however when we need to trigger inter-component actions this approach does not help.

Sending actions from component to controller

We will send an action from the component to the controller of the route in which the component is rendered using a computed property defined inside the controller, which watched the selectedTrackId.

{{public/session-filter selectedTrackId=selectedTrackId tracks=tracks}}

Whenever the anchor is clicked it passes the id of the selected track to the filter function of the component. Inside the filter function we set the selectedTrackId variable passed to the component inside the route template as specified above.

actions: {
  filter(trackId = null) {
    this.set('selectedTrackId', trackId);
  }
}

The selectedTrackId is a observed by a computed property defined in the controller which modified the track list based on the id passed by the sessions-filter component.

Handling action in the controller

Inside the controller we have a computed property which observes the sessions array and the selectedTrackId which is passed by the session-filter component to the controller called sessionsByTracks.

sessionsByTracks: computed('model.sessions.[]', 'selectedTrackId', function() {
  if (this.get('selectedTrackId')) {
    return chain(this.get('model.sessions'))
      .filter(['track.id', this.get('selectedTrackId')])
      .orderBy(['track.name', 'startAt'])
      .value();
  } else {
    return chain(this.get('model.sessions'))
      .orderBy(['track.name', 'startAt'])
      .groupBy('track.name')
      .value();
  }
}),
tracks: computed('model.sessions.[]', function() {
  return chain(this.get('model.sessions'))
    .map('track')
    .uniqBy('id')
    .orderBy('name')
    .value();
})

sessionsByTracks is the property gets filtered using the lodash functions based upon the id of session passed to it. On the first render all the sessions are displayed as the selectedTrackId is set to null.

{{public/session-list sessions=sessionsByTracks}}

This property is passed to the session-list component which renders the filtered list of session based on the selected session in session-filter component. Check the source code for the example here.

Resources

• Semantic UI
• Lodash