Acknowledgements

The beginning of your journey with Web Components.

Foreword

A brief introduction to the set of specifications called Web Components. We'll introduce you to concepts such as Shadow DOM, HTML templates, Custom Elements v1 and uncover typical use cases for developing Web Components.

Introduction to Web Components

We'll introduce you to the mockups in Figma, the development environment used throughout the book, and other conventions used in this book.

Conventions Used In The Book

A guide for installing various technologies needed prior to coding the exercises in this book.

Setting Up The Development Environment

We'll look at what you'll learn throughout Fullstack Web Components.

Module 1 Summary

Introduction

In Part 1, you'll code a form using several Web Components specifications.

Specification

Part One

By developing the CardComponent, you'll get hands on experience with autonomous custom elements.

Autonomous custom elements

Before you can develop the CardComponent, you'll need to scaffold the component in Storybook.

Template Slots

Shadow DOM provides encapsulation for styling and template. You'll style CardComponent with CSS in the context of the autonomous custom element's Shadow DOM.

Styling CardComponent

Write integration and snapshot tests for CardComponent using Cypress and Storybook Storyshots.

Testing the card

You built an autonomous custom element with Shadow DOM, HTML templates, and ES Modules. Let's reflect on that.

Chapter One Summary

Getting to Know Web Components

Form-associated custom elements allow custom elements to participate in HTML forms. From validation to submission, you'll code a text input end-to-end.

Form-associated custom elements

Scaffold a form-associated custom element named TextInputComponent in Storybook.

TextInputComponent

You'll learn what distinguises a form-associated custom element from an autonomous custom element, the formAssociated property and ElementInternals interface.

Form Associated and ElementInternals

Form-associated custom elements don't come with a pattern that validates an entire form, so you'll implement a pattern that allows form validation.

Handling Validation

Using observedAttributes and attributeChangedCallback to listen and react to changes in custom element attributes.

Listening for attribute changes

You'll style the various interaction states of the TextInputComponent form-associated custom element.

User feedback

We've created a problem by encapsulating the HTMLInputElement by Shadow DOM. The HTMLInputElement API cann't be accessed by the outside world. In this section, you'll fix that by implementing getters and setters that emulate the HTMLInputElement on TextInputComponent.

Emulating HTMLInputElement

You'll update the Story and provide the missing APIs to TextInputComponent that allow the component to fully interact with a HTML form.

Making a form

Reviewing the work completed on the form-associated custom element TextInputComponent.

Chapter Two Summary

You'll code ButtonComponent, a customized built-in element that inherits accessibility characteristics from HTMLButtonElement.

Customized built-in elements

Scaffold the customized built-in element ButtonComponent with Storybook.

Scaffolding ButtonComponent

Customized built-ins can't benefit from the encapsulation provided by Shadow DOM, so you'll have to find another way to style ButtonComponent.

Styling ButtonComponent

Revist the HTML form by making the user experience more accessible.

Making the form accessible

How customized built-in elements can make custom elements more accessible.

Chapter Three Summary

You'll learn best practices for developing a UI Library with Web Components by coding a micro-library, developing two custom elements with the micro-library, and figuring out how to package the UI library for distribution.

UI Library

Part Two

You'll abstract common patterns intro reusable code in a micro-library powered by TypeScript Decorators.

Micro-library

How to code an interface for Web Components with TypeScript decorators that enables declaration of the selector, styles, and template.

Class Decorator

You'll code a method decorator named Listen that binds event listeners to class methods.

Method Decorator

In this chapter you learned how to code a micro-library with TypeScript decorators that streamlines Web Component development.

Chapter Four Summary

You'll investigate multiple methods for components to communicate by coding an editable table.

Component Communication

How to use mock data in Storybook to code Web Components.

Mocking Table Data in Storybook

You'll learn about three methods for custom elements to communicate, attribute drilling, CustomEvent, and BroadcastChannel.

Coding Compound Components

You'll learn about how to create a separation of concerns between the many custom elements that comprise the editable table.

Making the Table Editable

You learned about how to create a separation of concerns between various custom elements in the same user experience flow.

Summary

Compound Custom Elements

You'll learn how to code a common UX pattern (dialogs) using HTML templates and custom elements.

HTML Templates

You'll mock the DialogComponent in Storybook.

Mocking the Dialog in Storybook

You'll make a configurable dialog with custom elements.

DialogComponent

You'll scaffold two custom elements that leverage DialogComponent to display modals and tooltips.

Modal and Tooltip

You'll fix an issue faced in the last section by learning how to query for elements across Shadow boundaries.

Querying DOM Across Shadow Boundaries

You'll control the ordering and event cycle of dialogs with a custom class named DialogStack.

DialogStack

Summarizing the work completed in DialogComponent, ModalComponent, TooltipComponent, and DialogStack.

Chapter Six Summary

Powering Dialogs with HTML Templates

You'll learn best practices for organizing and distributing Web Component UI libraries.

UI Libraries

You'll learn brest practices for distributing Web Components by formatting the code with named exports, configuring the build with Rollup, providing a standard package format, and writing a custom Node.js script that enables you to publish packages.

Distribution

Custom Elements Manifest provides a wealth of information about each component. After generating a manifest, it will provide documentation for each component in Storybook.

Documentation

You'll learn how to setup continuous integration for the UI library with Github Actions.

Continuous Integration

Let's reflect on the best practices you learned for distributing UI libraries filled with Web Components.

Chapter Seven Summary

Distributing Custom Element Libraries

You'll integrate the UI library with a single-page application and code the end-to-end user experience with custom elements.

Application

Part Three

You'll provide a separation of concerns with custom elements in a single page application.

Application Development with Custom Elements

You'll scaffold the landing page with an autonomous custom element named MainView.

Landing Page

You'll code a global header with autonomous custom elements named AppHeader.

Header

You'll code another autonomous custom element that handles cookie authorization named CookieFooter.

CookieFooter

You'll lazyload an image with customized built-ins.

Background

You developed the landing page of the application, learning how to architect a separation of concerns between the UI components.

Chapter Eight Summary

To handle multiple views in the single page application, you'll need to implement a router that can navigate between each view.

Routing Custom Elements in a SPA

You'll code the Router class that handles the creation and removal of views in the application.

Routing

You'll code the necessary components and services required in the login view.

Login View

Integrate TableCardComponent into a third view of the single page application, the dashboard.

Dashboard View

You coded a single page web application with custom elements and a custom router.

Chapter Nine Summary

You'll server-side render the views of the application with Declarative Shadow DOM and @lit-labs/ssr

Server-Side Rendering Custom Elements

You'll declare a server-side renderable Declarative Shadow DOM HTML template for each component.

Declarative Shadow DOM Templates

To get custom elements to work in Node.js, you'll need to polyfill DOM APIs. Luckily, @lit-labs/ssr provides a tool that enables just that.

Shim

You'll develop Express middleware that server-side renders Declarative Shadow DOM HTML Templates with @lit-labs/ssr.

Express Middleware

You rendered custom elements server-side using Declarative Shadow DOM and @lit-labs/ssr.

Chapter Ten Summary

Server-side Rendering with Declarative Shadow DOM

The conclusion of the book Fullstack Custom Elements.

Conclusion

Fullstack Web Components

Enter your name and email address below, then click the **"Send my free chapter"** button to get started

There are several books about Web Components, but none go into how to integrate Web Components in a typical enterprise web development workflow. This book is designed to help you learn Web Components and integrate it into your work.

In this book, we cover the basics of Web Components, how to code complex user interfaces with custom elements in Storybook, how to test and maintain UI libraries built with custom elements, and how to build web applications entirely with Web Components and browser specifications. It comes with complete code examples. We walk through the entire process step-by-step.

It's taught by Stephen Belovarich, a software engineer and web developer. Stephen has provided what he's learned about UI libraries and web applications while working at Ubiquiti Networks, Norton, Nike, NBC Universal, and Workday, that can benefit other developers, students, and anyone making a website.

The Complete Guide to Building UI Libraries with Web Components

In this book, we will learn Web Components through the lens of a JavaScript developer.

The basics of working with and manipulating Web Components

The best practices for maintaining a UI library made of custom elements

How to create a micro-library for Web Components with TypeScript Decorators

What problems Web Components can solve in everyday development

How to build web applications entirely from Web Components and JavaScript

Thus far, we've developed custom elements in isolation. Aside from the 

 being able to dynamically accept any child element using HTML template slots, we haven't looked at any way custom elements can work seamlessly together. In this chapter, you'll focus exactly on that by building an interactive table component. You'll use browser specifications that enable each component of the table to interact with each other.

. Users can edit the content of each cell in the table, create and delete table rows, and cancel editing; resetting the value of the table to a state before it was edited. Not only does the table component have to handle CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete), the component will also have to have at least three visible states: read-only, editable, and add row. This means we not only have to provide some sort of state mechanism for 

, but we also have to manipulate DOM elements based on changes to table state and react accordingly to different event-based patterns we'll discover while developing the table.

 has three modes: read-only, editable, and add row. In read-only, table cells are displayed as text. When the user presses "edit", the table cells transform into editable text fields and focus is placed on the first cell. If the user clicks the "add" button in any mode, the table enters edit mode if needed, and a row of blank text inputs appear for the user to enter a row of information. When the user presses "save", the current state of the table is saved. If the user presses "cancel", the table returns to read-only mode with the state from before the user started editing.

In this exercise, you'll stick with best practices when architecting the components that comprise the interactive experience. You'll use a strict separation of concerns between the card that displays the entire layout: a table and footer with interactive buttons for adding a row, initiating edit mode, cancelling or saving the current edit; the table itself, table rows, and table cells. You'll create several different components that are only concerned with their discrete functionality.

To maintain a separation of concerns, you'll need mechanisms that allow instances of each component to communicate with one another. A robust event-based pattern helps in this regard. The buttons in 

 should dispatch an event that triggers some logic in 

The three methods for component communication you'll explore in this chapter are passing data through HTML attributes, dispatching 

 to HTML elements directly, and utilizing 

 for dispatching events where elements that should receive them are not directly accessible.

Setting HTML attributes of a custom element are one way two elements can communicate. When a custom element is easily queried, it's relatively simple to set the value of an attribute using 

. This method is alright for simple data types, although anything passed through HTML attributes is typically treated as a string. If you wanted to pass a number through a HTML attribute, it gets converted to a string, so you have to coerce it back to a number. This behavior is validated in 

. Complex data types are not out of the question. As long as you can coerce the data into a string, it can pass through an attribute, although it should be warned, passing PII (Personal Identifiable Information) through HTML attributes is not recommended. Anything passed to a HTML attribute is easily statically analyzable in the DOM by scrapers.

---
title: Component Communication
description: You'll investigate multiple methods for components to communicate by coding an editable table.
role: "INTRODUCTION"
isPublicLesson: true
---

# Chapter Five

## Component Communication

Thus far, we've developed custom elements in isolation. Aside from the `CardComponent` being able to dynamically accept any child element using HTML template slots, we haven't looked at any way custom elements can work seamlessly together. In this chapter, you'll focus exactly on that by building an interactive table component. You'll use browser specifications that enable each component of the table to interact with each other.

![](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/fullstack-web-components/module_08/lesson_08.01/public/assets/table.png)

Take a moment to review [Figma](https://www.figma.com/file/QXGa6qN6AqgeerCtS28I8z/Web-Components-Book-Design-Library?node-id=725%3A44). Users can edit the content of each cell in the table, create and delete table rows, and cancel editing; resetting the value of the table to a state before it was edited. Not only does the table component have to handle CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete), the component will also have to have at least three visible states: read-only, editable, and add row. This means we not only have to provide some sort of state mechanism for `HTMLTableElement`, but we also have to manipulate DOM elements based on changes to table state and react accordingly to different event-based patterns we'll discover while developing the table.

`TableCardComponent` has three modes: read-only, editable, and add row. In read-only, table cells are displayed as text. When the user presses "edit", the table cells transform into editable text fields and focus is placed on the first cell. If the user clicks the "add" button in any mode, the table enters edit mode if needed, and a row of blank text inputs appear for the user to enter a row of information. When the user presses "save", the current state of the table is saved. If the user presses "cancel", the table returns to read-only mode with the state from before the user started editing.

### TableComponent

In this exercise, you'll stick with best practices when architecting the components that comprise the interactive experience. You'll use a strict separation of concerns between the card that displays the entire layout: a table and footer with interactive buttons for adding a row, initiating edit mode, cancelling or saving the current edit; the table itself, table rows, and table cells. You'll create several different components that are only concerned with their discrete functionality.

To maintain a separation of concerns, you'll need mechanisms that allow instances of each component to communicate with one another. A robust event-based pattern helps in this regard. The buttons in `TableCardComponent` should dispatch an event that triggers some logic in `TableComponent` to add a row (`TrComponent`). `TrComponent` will control some aspect of how `TdComponent` are displayed.

The three methods for component communication you'll explore in this chapter are passing data through HTML attributes, dispatching `CustomEvent` to HTML elements directly, and utilizing `BroadcastChannel` for dispatching events where elements that should receive them are not directly accessible.

### HTML Attributes

Setting HTML attributes of a custom element are one way two elements can communicate. When a custom element is easily queried, it's relatively simple to set the value of an attribute using `setAttribute`. This method is alright for simple data types, although anything passed through HTML attributes is typically treated as a string. If you wanted to pass a number through a HTML attribute, it gets converted to a string, so you have to coerce it back to a number. This behavior is validated in [MDN documentation](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/setAttribute). Complex data types are not out of the question. As long as you can coerce the data into a string, it can pass through an attribute, although it should be warned, passing PII (Personal Identifiable Information) through HTML attributes is not recommended. Anything passed to a HTML attribute is easily statically analyzable in the DOM by scrapers.