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Frame-Powered Inline Editing

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Make sure you're logged in... and then head over to any product page. We already have a product admin section. And since we are an admin - lucky us - we can use it to edit any product. To make life cooler for admin users, let's add an edit link right on the public show page.

Easy enough: open the template for this page - templates/product/show.html.twig - find the h1 and move it onto multiple lines. Then add if is_granted('ROLE_ADMIN') and endif. Inside, we can create a boring anchor tag that points to the edit page: path('product_admin_edit') with id set to product.id.

Oh, but I'm going to put this onto multiple lines in a slightly different way... so that we can cleanly give this a few classes. For the text, say "Edit".

52 lines | templates/product/show.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 16
<h1>
{{ product.name }}
{% if is_granted('ROLE_ADMIN') %}
<a
href="{{ path('product_admin_edit', {
id: product.id
}) }}"
class="btn btn-sm btn-secondary"
>Edit</a>
{% endif %}
</h1>
// ... lines 28 - 52

Nothing magic yet. When we refresh, there's our link... a fantastically boring edit link. Thanks to Turbo Drive, clicking it feels pretty good. And with a bit more work, we could add a link back to the public show page. Heck, we could even attach a query parameter when we click this edit button - like ?from= - and use that on the admin page to dynamically link back to the admin index page - like it is now - or back to the product show page if that's where we originally came from. We could even go further and also make the form redirect back to that page after success. My point is, thanks to the smoothness of Turbo Drive, there are many ways that we could make this process even smoother simply by writing a little Twig & PHP code.

But instead of doing any of those, let's progressively enhance this in a different way: by making the edit link load the form right onto the public show page. That sounds like a job for a turbo frame!

Adding the turbo-frame

Head back to the template and scroll to the top. Okay: we have a col-4 and a col-8 - that's the left and right sides of this page. Our new mission is to wrap that entire area in a turbo-frame so that it can be replaced by the edit form. So basically, we need a frame right inside of this "row" div.

Say <turbo-frame id="" and call it, how about product-info. I'm also going to add a target="_top" so that everything inside, at least for now, will behave completely normally: as if there were no frame.

Take the turbo-frame closing tag and... put it all the way down here: I think this is the right spot.

54 lines | templates/product/show.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 2
{% block productBody %}
<div class="row pt-3 product-show">
<turbo-frame id="product-info" target="_top">
<div class="col-4">
<img
alt="{{ product.name }}"
src="{{ asset('/uploads/products/'~product.imageFilename) }}"
class="d-block"
>
<div class="p-2">
<small>brought to you by </small>
<small class="d-inline">{{ product.brand }}</small>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-8 px-3">
<h1>
{{ product.name }}
{% if is_granted('ROLE_ADMIN') %}
<a
href="{{ path('product_admin_edit', {
id: product.id
}) }}"
class="btn btn-sm btn-secondary"
>Edit</a>
{% endif %}
</h1>
<div>
{{ product.description }}
</div>
<div class="p-3 mt-4 d-flex justify-content-between flex-wrap flex-lg-nowrap">
<div>
<strong>{{ product.priceString|format_currency('USD') }}</strong>
<br>
<strong>{{ product.reviews|length }}</strong> Reviews
<br/>
<strong>{{ product.averageStars }}/5</strong><i class="fas fa-star ms-2"></i>
</div>
<div>
{{ include('product/_cart_add_controls.html.twig') }}
</div>
</div>
</div>
</turbo-frame>
</div>
// ... lines 47 - 54

Let's see how things look so far. Refresh and... whoa! That completely messed up our styling! Why? Inspect element on this area. The problem is that we added an element between the row and the columns... and with CSS Flexbox, sometimes the direct relationship between elements is important. By putting this turbo-frame in the middle, we angered the Flexbox gods!

Using turbo-frame as a Normal Element

So what can we do? One obvious idea is to move the turbo-frame around the row div so that we don't interrupt the row-column relationship. That would work.

But... turbo-frame is just a normal HTML element... so we could also change the row element from a div to a turbo-frame!

Check it out: delete the turbo-frame closing tag. Then, on top, copy the guts from the turbo-frame, change the div to a turbo-frame and re-add id and target. Down on the closing tag, ah nice! PhpStorm already changed that for me.

52 lines | templates/product/show.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 3
<turbo-frame id="product-info" target="_top" class="row pt-3 product-show">
<div class="col-4">
<img
alt="{{ product.name }}"
src="{{ asset('/uploads/products/'~product.imageFilename) }}"
class="d-block"
>
<div class="p-2">
<small>brought to you by </small>
<small class="d-inline">{{ product.brand }}</small>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-8 px-3">
<h1>
{{ product.name }}
{% if is_granted('ROLE_ADMIN') %}
<a
href="{{ path('product_admin_edit', {
id: product.id
}) }}"
class="btn btn-sm btn-secondary"
>Edit</a>
{% endif %}
</h1>
<div>
{{ product.description }}
</div>
<div class="p-3 mt-4 d-flex justify-content-between flex-wrap flex-lg-nowrap">
<div>
<strong>{{ product.priceString|format_currency('USD') }}</strong>
<br>
<strong>{{ product.reviews|length }}</strong> Reviews
<br/>
<strong>{{ product.averageStars }}/5</strong><i class="fas fa-star ms-2"></i>
</div>
<div>
{{ include('product/_cart_add_controls.html.twig') }}
</div>
</div>
</div>
</turbo-frame>
// ... lines 45 - 52

When we refresh now... it looks good again! But because our frame has target="_top"... the frame doesn't do anything yet: the edit link still navigates the entire page.

To fix that, find the link... which is down here... and make it target the frame: data-turbo-frame="product-info".

53 lines | templates/product/show.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 16
<h1>
{{ product.name }}
{% if is_granted('ROLE_ADMIN') %}
<a
href="{{ path('product_admin_edit', {
id: product.id
}) }}"
class="btn btn-sm btn-secondary"
data-turbo-frame="product-info"
>Edit</a>
{% endif %}
</h1>
// ... lines 29 - 53

Will this work? Not quite... and you may remember why. Refresh and click Edit. The whole area disappeared! And we see our favorite error in the console:

Response has no matching <turbo-frame id="product-info"> element.

Of course! The page that that we're navigating to - the product admin edit page - must also have a product-info frame.

The template for that product admin edit page lives at templates/product_admin/edit.html.twig. The actual form lives inside _form.html.twig. So we could add the turbo-frame here around the form. But I kind of do want the "edit product" h1 and the "delete form" button to also be loaded when we click "edit". So let's add the turbo-frame right here.

After the back button - because we don't want to include that - add <turbo-frame id="product-info">. I'm also going to add target="_top" here to guarantee that, by default, any links or forms inside here continue to behave like normal when we navigate directly to the product admin page.

Add the closing frame tag and indent everything.

18 lines | templates/product_admin/edit.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 4
{% block body %}
<div class="container mt-4">
<a href="{{ path('product_admin_index') }}"><i class="fas fa-caret-left"></i> Back to list</a>
<turbo-frame id="product-info" target="_top">
<div class="d-flex justify-content-between">
<h1 class="mt-3">Edit Product</h1>
{{ include('product_admin/_delete_form.html.twig') }}
</div>
{{ include('product_admin/_form.html.twig', {'button_label': 'Update'}) }}
</turbo-frame>
</div>
{% endblock %}

That should do it! Refresh the page... and click edit. Sweet! We see the form but we're still on the product show page!

So far, this has been pretty easy: a perfect use-case for Turbo Frames. Let's take a victory lap!

Except... something isn't quite right. If we change the title and submit the form... woh! That looked like a full page refresh! Let's find out what's going on next, fix it, and complete our inline editing destiny!