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14.

Data Tables with Turbo Frames

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Our data tables-like setup is working. And it's almost awesome. What I don't love is how it jumps around. Every time we click a link, it jumps back to the top of the page. Boo.

That's because Turbo is reloading the full page. And when it does that, it scrolls to the top... because that's usually what we want! But not this time. I want our data table to work like a little application: where the content changes without moving around.

Turbo 8 Morphing?

There are two great ways to solve this. In Turbo 8 - which is not released yet, it's Beta 1 at the time of recording this - there's a new feature called page refreshes that leverages morphing. Without nerding out too much - and I want to - when navigating to the same page - like our search form, column sorting and pagination links all do - we can tell Turbo to only update the content on the page that changed... and to preserve the scroll position. So, keep an eye out for that.

Adding a Turbo Frame

The second way - which works fantastically today - is to surround this entire table with a <turbo-frame>. In homepage.html.twig, find the table. Here it is: this div represents the table. Above it, add <turbo-frame id="voyage-list">. Indent this div... and also these pagination links: we want those to be inside the Turbo frame so that when we click on them, they advance the frame & update:

138 lines | templates/main/homepage.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 27
{% block body %}
<div class="flex">
// ... lines 30 - 36
<section class="flex-1 ml-10">
// ... lines 38 - 55
<turbo-frame id="voyage-list">
<div class="bg-gray-800 p-4 rounded">
<table class="w-full text-white">
// ... lines 59 - 120
</table>
</div>
<div class="flex items-center mt-6 space-x-4">
// ... lines 124 - 132
</div>
</turbo-frame>
</section>
</div>
{% endblock %}

Let's try this. Zap that search clear. And oh... beautiful. Look at that! Everything moves within the frame. Try pagination. That too! All of our links point back to the homepage... and the homepage, of course, has this frame.

But remember: now that this table lives inside a Turbo frame, if we have any links inside, they'll stop working. Again, to fix that, on each link, add data-turbo-frame="_top". Or to be more conservative, go up to the new <turbo-frame> and add target="_top". If you do that, you'll also need to find the sorting and pagination links that should navigate the frame and add data-turbo-frame="voyage-list".

But I'll remove those... because we don't have any links in the table.

Targeting the Search on the Form

At this point, the pagination and sorting links work perfectly! But... the search? The search is still a full page reload. That makes sense! I didn't put that inside the frame. Why? Because, if we had, when we typed and the frame reloaded, it would have also reloaded the search box... which would still reset my cursor position. So we don't want the form to reload.

Can we... keep this outside of the frame but target the frame when the form submits? We can! Up on the form element that submits, add data-turbo-frame="voyage-list":

139 lines | templates/main/homepage.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 27
{% block body %}
<div class="flex">
// ... lines 30 - 36
<section class="flex-1 ml-10">
<form
// ... lines 39 - 42
data-turbo-frame="voyage-list"
>
// ... lines 45 - 55
</form>
// ... lines 57 - 135
</section>
</div>
{% endblock %}

Isn't that cool? Now when we refresh: watch. It's perfect! The table loads, but I keep my input focus. This is gorgeous.

Adding a Loading Screen

And now we have time to make things extra fancy! What about a loading indicator on the table while it's navigating? To make this obvious, go to our controller and add a sleep() for one second:

46 lines | src/Controller/MainController.php
// ... lines 1 - 14
class MainController extends AbstractController
{
#[Route('/', name: 'app_homepage')]
public function homepage(
// ... lines 19 - 25
): Response
{
// ... lines 28 - 29
sleep(1);
// ... lines 31 - 43
}
}

Now... it's slow... and when we click or search, we don't even getting any feedback that the site is doing anything.

How can we add a loading indicator? This is a spot where Turbo has our back. So here's the <turbo-frame> element. Watch the attributes at the end when I navigate. Did you see that? Turbo added an aria-busy="true" attribute while it was loading. That's there for accessibility, but it's also something that we can leverage within Tailwind!

Over on that <turbo-frame> element, here it is, say class="" with aria-busy:opacity-50.

This special syntax says that, if this element has an aria-busy attribute, apply the opacity-50. Add one more aria-busy: with blur-sm to blur the background. And for extra points, include transition-all so that the opacity and blur transition instead of happening abruptly:

139 lines | templates/main/homepage.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 27
{% block body %}
<div class="flex">
// ... lines 30 - 36
<section class="flex-1 ml-10">
// ... lines 38 - 56
<turbo-frame id="voyage-list" class="aria-busy:opacity-50 aria-busy:blur-sm transition-all">
// ... lines 58 - 134
</turbo-frame>
</section>
</div>
{% endblock %}

Tip

For an even nicer effect, you can also change the opacity & blur only if loading takes longer than, for example, 700ms. Do that by adding an aria-busy:delay-700 class.

Refresh that and watch. Oh, that's lovely! And it all happens thanks to 3 CSS classes. And, though I love watching that, in MainController, remove the sleep.

Advancing the Frame

Is this mission accomplished? Nearly. There's one gigantic, horrible problem... with an easy solution. When we search or sort or paginate, the URL doesn't change. That's the default behavior of Turbo frames: when they navigate, they don't update the URL. However, we can tell Turbo that we want this. On the Turbo Frame, add data-turbo-action="advance":

139 lines | templates/main/homepage.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 27
{% block body %}
<div class="flex">
// ... lines 30 - 36
<section class="flex-1 ml-10">
// ... lines 38 - 56
<turbo-frame id="voyage-list" data-turbo-action="advance" class="aria-busy:opacity-50 aria-busy:blur-sm transition-all">
// ... lines 58 - 134
</turbo-frame>
</section>
</div>
{% endblock %}

Advance means that it will update the URL and advance the browser history so that if we hit the "Back" button, it'll go the previous URL. You can also use replace to change the URL, but without adding to the history.

Watch: this time when we search... the URL updates! And as we navigate to page two or three... it updates... and we can hit back, back, and forward, forward.

We now have a truly fantastic data tables setup... entirely written without any custom JavaScript inside of Twig and Symfony. What a time to be alive.

The final teensy problem is this "30 results". As we search, that never changes: it's stuck on whatever number was there when the original page loaded. That's because this lives outside the Turbo frame. The easiest fix would be to move it into the frame... but I don't want it there! Visually, I want it up here!

We're going to leave that for now. But we'll fix it in a few days with Turbo Streams.

Tomorrow, we're going to dive into a brand-new browser feature! It's called View Transitions, and it'll let us apply visual transitions to any navigation.