Refresh events for individual frames

[rbclark]

Refresh events for individual frames

[krschacht]

@rbclark That seems off to me because the refresh action which is broadcast is tied to a specific model and then views simply subscribe to refreshes from that model. The model does blind broadcasts_refreshes and any pages which are subscribed to it refresh. It does not seem proper for the backend model to consider which particular frame to send a refresh to.

What happens now if you put a <%= turbo_stream_from :model %> inside a turbo frame and then have the backend do it's usual broadcasts_refreshes`?

I know for sure that if the turbo_stream_from is outside of the turbo-frame, that will trigger a refreshing morph of the full page, which subsequently triggers a morphing refresh to each individual turbo-frame on the page (provided that those turbo frames have refresh=morph. It sounds like this alone would get you what you want.

But it may be the case that if you put the turbo_stream_from inside of a turbo frame it might only refresh that frame, without having to do a special refresh broadcast which targets that frame. Give it a shot and see what happens. And if that doesn't work then maybe the base-case will still work for you to just trigger a refresh of the full page.

[rbclark]

@krschacht Thank you for your reply! I appreciate your perspective on this, it seems I've used broadcast_replace_to(dom_id(...)) one too many times and seem to still be thinking in that paradigm. Putting a refresh inside a turbo frame makes a lot more sense. I tried out what you said, I placed a turbo_stream_from @model and added broadcasts_refreshes inside of that model inside of a turbo_frame to test it out and unfortunately it just went ahead and triggered a full page morph instead of a targeted frame morph.

For the page in question, it already heavily utilizes turbo streams and stimulus controllers. I spent most of the week investigating converting it over to morphing and came to the conclusion that it would be a significant undertaking to get it all to morph properly since the page consists of filtering, sorting, cross-page-multi-select, and expandable sections each with their own trix editor. I'm also a bit worried about the performance of this page after a full morph since I had to apply a decent amount of logic in before-morph actions to preserve existing state during my testing. Overall in my case I think there would be a lot less strange edge cases and an overall faster user experience in my application if I could easily trigger refreshes of compartmentalized frames.

[krschacht]

Conceptually, the idea behind broadcast_refresh is "I don't want to think about what parts of the page need to be updated. Please update any parts of the page that ought to change now that I've made an update to this particular model." So the idea that it always triggers a full page morph feels appropriate. Because a full page morph may result in zero dom nodes being updates or lots of dom nodes updating.

I would be surprised that morphing would mess things up. Maybe you simply need to add some "permanent" tags in the right places.

But I'm still new to moprhing as well so I don't know all the edge cases with it. My app is pretty simple so far (https://github.com/the-dot-bot/hostedgpt)

[krschacht]

Oh, but note that once The 1192 PR gets merged in you will be able to use javascript to target any individual turbo-frame you want and call a .refresh() on it. So it would be a bit hacky, but you could wire up your own special turbo stream action which exists solely to trigger the morphing refresh of specific turbo frames.

[rbclark]

@krschacht I tried to document some of the gotcha’s that I think are bugs in a few of the issues I opened on this repository. A lot of the issues revolved around keeping stimulus state and things like that. There’s also some stuff that I want to be permanent in some situations and temporary in others, the app I’m working on has one very complex page in particular that is causing issues.

Regarding implementing a custom turbo action, that’s my plan next week. I just figured I’d float the idea to the project as a whole since I think it’ll be useful for people other than just me!