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🧐 What is Loco-Rails-Core?

Loco-Rails-Core is a Rails plugin that has been extracted from Loco-Rails. The reason for this extraction was to pull out the functionality that can be used as a stand-alone lib. This functionality was the origin of the Loco-Rails project.

I wanted to provide a logical structure for JavaScript code that would be corresponding with Rails` controllers and views. The same controller's action would be called on the JavaScript level that renders a response for a given request on the Rails side. By "the same" - I mean action with the same name and defined in an (optionally namespaced) controller with the corresponding name as the one on the server-side.

The Loco-Rails-Core by itself does not provide a lot of value. It has to be used with its JavaScript complementary library - Loco-JS. Loco-Rails-Core's single generator adds Loco::Core::Helpers module to ApplicationHelper. It also updates the application.html.erb layout by adding data-* attributes to HTML <body> element.
Loco-Rails-Core does this via methods defined in the aforementioned Loco::Core::Helpers module.

These attributes store the information about namespace, controller and action names involved in handing a given request. Loco-JS looks at those attributes to call out method from the corresponding location but inside the JavaScript code. In other words - Loco-JS will call a JavaScript controller's action with the same name and located inside the same namespace.

Example:

Given that the index action from Main::PagesControllers handles a given request. <body>'s data attributes are gonna look like this:

<body data-namespace="Main" data-controller="Pages" data-action="index">
</body>

Loco-JS will act in the similar fashion (simplified version):

import { Controllers } from "loco-js";

namespaceController = new Controllers.Main;
namespaceController.initialize();

controller = new Controllers.Main.Pages;
controller.initialize();
controller.index();

If you don't define a namespace controlller - it will be skipped.
If you don't define an initialize or index actions - Loco-JS won't call them.
You can define a JavaScript counterparts only for those actions that you want to augment with JavaScript features.

Loco-Rails-Core is a good choice if you don't need all the features that Loco-Rails provides.

📥 Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'loco-rails-core'

And then execute:

$ bundle

🎮 Usage

$ bin/rails generate loco:core:file_injector

👩🏽‍🔬 Tests

$ bin/test

📜 License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

👨‍🏭 Author

Zbigniew Humeniuk from Art of Code