> JavaScript Frameworks & Tools > The Delightful World of Vue Part 2
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02.

Page 2: Product Show Page

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Let's build a page to view a single product! We'll get there by clicking on this link... or the image or... any of this.

We could use the Vue router so that when we click any of these links, there's no full page refresh. We'll save that for another tutorial in part, because I want to show how Vue can be used as just one piece of a traditional app.

Linking to Another Page

This means that we will make these nice traditional links. The Vue component that renders this lives at assets/components/product-list/product-card.vue. Let's start by wrapping the image in an anchor tag. Add an a, a closing a, indent and, for the href, we can use a computed property to keep things clean: :href=productUrl.

83 lines | assets/components/product-list/product-card.vue
<template>
<div class="col-xs-12 col-6 mb-2 pb-2">
<div :class="$style['product-box']">
<div :class="$style.image">
<a :href="productUrl">
<img
// ... lines 7 - 9
>
</a>
// ... lines 12 - 18
</div>
// ... lines 20 - 31
</div>
// ... lines 33 - 36
</div>
</template>
// ... lines 39 - 83

Do the same thing down around the product name: <a :href="productUrl">. And to be extra cool, we can use v-text to print the product name.

That part is totally unnecessary, it's just more hipster... because now the anchor can be self-closing. Oooo.

83 lines | assets/components/product-list/product-card.vue
<template>
<div class="col-xs-12 col-6 mb-2 pb-2">
<div :class="$style['product-box']">
<div :class="$style.image">
// ... lines 5 - 12
<h3 class="font-weight-bold mb-2 px-2">
<a
:href="productUrl"
v-text="product.name"
/>
</h3>
</div>
// ... lines 20 - 31
</div>
// ... lines 33 - 36
</div>
</template>
// ... lines 39 - 83

Finally, for the "View Product" button, we should really change this to a normal anchor tag with an href. But to be extra complicated, let's activate it with a click listener: @click="" and call a method we'll add soon: goToProduct().

84 lines | assets/components/product-list/product-card.vue
<template>
<div class="col-xs-12 col-6 mb-2 pb-2">
<div :class="$style['product-box']">
// ... lines 4 - 20
<div class="p-2 my-3 d-md-flex justify-content-between">
// ... lines 22 - 25
<button
class="btn btn-info btn-sm"
@click="goToProduct()"
>
View Product
</button>
</div>
</div>
// ... lines 34 - 37
</div>
</template>
// ... lines 40 - 84

To be clear: I would not do this in a real app - it's weird to make normal navigational links use fancy JavaScript... and it's not great for accessibility. I'm just trying to make our life harder for the tutorial. Yay learning!

Head over to the browser and open your debugging tools. Thanks to the dev server, we don't even need to refresh: it's already panicking because the "property or method, productUrl is not defined on the instance".

Let's add that first. In the component, we already have a computed section. Add another: productUrl. For the return, use the fancy "ticks" so we can say /products/ then ${} with product.id inside. As you'll see in a minute, I've already created a route and controller for this URL.

92 lines | assets/components/product-list/product-card.vue
// ... lines 1 - 40
<script>
// ... lines 42 - 43
export default {
// ... lines 45 - 51
computed: {
// ... lines 53 - 60
/**
* Returns the URL for the product
* @returns {string}
*/
productUrl() {
return `/product/${this.product.id}`;
},
},
};
</script>
// ... lines 71 - 92

And, yes: I am hardcoding that URL. You can generate URLs dynamically by using FOSJsRoutingBundle, but I'm fine with hardcoding them: it makes my life simpler. We also talked about this in the first tutorial.

To finish things, we need a method for the @click listener: goToProduct(). At the bottom, add a methods section with goToProduct(). Inside, say window.location = and then this.productUrl to re-use our computed property.

100 lines | assets/components/product-list/product-card.vue
// ... lines 1 - 40
<script>
// ... lines 42 - 43
export default {
// ... lines 45 - 68
methods: {
/**
* Goes to the URL of the product
*/
goToProduct() {
window.location = this.productUrl;
},
},
};
</script>
// ... lines 79 - 100

Super nice! Let's try it! When I move back to the browser, it automatically reloaded for me. Click any of the spots and... big error page!

The Product Page

Before I started recording the tutorial, I created a route and controller for this URL. Open src/Controller/ProductController.php. This controller renders every page we've seen so far: the homepage - which lists all the products:

44 lines | src/Controller/ProductController.php
// ... lines 1 - 12
class ProductController extends AbstractController
{
/**
* @Route("/", name="app_homepage")
*/
public function index(CategoryRepository $categoryRepository): Response
{
return $this->render('product/index.html.twig', [
'categories' => $categoryRepository->findAll(),
]);
}
// ... lines 24 - 42
}

the category page:

44 lines | src/Controller/ProductController.php
// ... lines 1 - 12
class ProductController extends AbstractController
{
// ... lines 15 - 24
/**
* @Route("/category/{id}", name="app_category")
*/
public function showCategory(Category $category, IriConverterInterface $iriConverter, CategoryRepository $categoryRepository): Response
{
return $this->render('product/index.html.twig', [
'currentCategoryId' => $iriConverter->getIriFromItem($category),
'categories' => $categoryRepository->findAll(),
]);
}
// ... lines 35 - 42
}

and - now - the individual product page. This is what's currently being executed.

44 lines | src/Controller/ProductController.php
// ... lines 1 - 12
class ProductController extends AbstractController
{
// ... lines 15 - 35
/**
* @Route("/product/{id}", name="app_product")
*/
public function showProduct(Product $product): Response
{
return $this->render('product/index.html.twig');
}
}

Notice that all of these render the same template, which is templates/product/index.html.twig.

But, hold on, let's back up. We can make this "product show" page look and work however we want. For example, we could decide that this is going to be a normal, Twig-rendered HTML page: maybe we only needed Vue for the fancy product list. So, we could render a new product/show.html.twig and... be done.

Or, if the page is going to be fancy and Vue would be useful, we could render a totally different Webpack entry that renders a different, new Vue application.

Or... again, we could render the same Vue application that we've been using, but make that smarter by detecting that we're on the product show page and rendering in a different way.

We're still doing full page refreshes, but this is the idea behind a single page application, or even a mini single page application that powers just one section of your site. You have one piece of code that renders different components based on the URL. This is what we're going to do.

The current Vue Setup

As a reminder, here is how the whole thing works currently. In index.html.twig, we're including the products entry, which is the assets/products.js file.

27 lines | templates/product/index.html.twig
// ... lines 1 - 6
{% block stylesheets %}
// ... lines 8 - 9
{{ encore_entry_link_tags('products') }}
{% endblock %}
// ... line 12
{% block javascripts %}
// ... lines 14 - 24
{{ encore_entry_script_tags('products') }}
{% endblock %}

This grabs the assets/pages/products.vue component - that's right here - and renders it.

62 lines | assets/pages/products.vue
<template>
<div class="container-fluid">
<div class="row">
<aside :class="asideClass">
<sidebar
:collapsed="sidebarCollapsed"
:current-category-id="currentCategoryId"
:categories="categories"
@toggle-collapsed="toggleSidebarCollapsed"
/>
</aside>
<div :class="contentClass">
<catalog
:current-category-id="currentCategoryId"
:categories="categories"
/>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</template>
// ... lines 22 - 62

We're now going to make this component smart enough to either render the product list page or the product show page. Normally that kind of toggling is done with a Vue router, but we're going to do it by passing info from the server, which in some ways, will be trickier.

Anyways, the new product show controller is already set up to use that same index.html.twig template that renders the products entrypoint and ultimately renders the products.vue component. But to get this to work, the template needs a categories variable so it can set a global categories JavaScript variable that we're using.

To pass that, we'll use the same code as the other controllers. Copy the categories variable from up here. Then, we'll need to autowire the CategoryRepository: CategoryRepository $categoryRepository, add a 2nd argument to render(), and paste!

46 lines | src/Controller/ProductController.php
// ... lines 1 - 7
use App\Repository\CategoryRepository;
// ... lines 9 - 12
class ProductController extends AbstractController
{
// ... lines 15 - 38
public function showProduct(Product $product, CategoryRepository $categoryRepository): Response
{
return $this->render('product/index.html.twig', [
'categories' => $categoryRepository->findAll(),
]);
}
}

Now when we refresh... it's alive! Well... it's still executing the exact same Vue app as before.... which renders the product list page... but it's a start.

So next: let's pass some info to Vue to say:

Hey! We are on the product show page!

We'll then use that info inside products.vue to render something different.