I have a Vue 2 project made with Vue CLI, and I plan to distribute it as a library, ideally with the dependencies and Vue syntax stuff abstracted away by some kind of wrapper script. I would like to allow this kind of interaction:
// mount the component on a plain JS webpage
const myComponent = new MyComponent('#my-component');
// handle events from the component in vanilla JS
myComponent.on('load', someHandler);
// (A.) call a component method and get a return value
const processedData = myComponent.process(123);
// (B.) access/mutate reactive component data properties
myComponent.setMessage('Hello world!');
I have tried changing the "build target" to build a Libary or a Web Component as mentioned in the Vue documentation. I can mount the library component just fine, and handle events, but it doesn't mention how I might interact with the component data from outside the Vue VM (see comments A and B).
How can I access Vue component methods and data properties from outside the Vue VM, in vanilla JS?
To access the Vue component properties (and methods) outside of the VM, you can mount it with a "template ref" like this:
const vm = new Vue({
components: {
MyComponent,
},
template: `
<my-component
ref="myComponent"
/>
`,
}).$mount('#mount-element");
and then you can call its methods like this:
vm.$refs.myComponent.someFunction();
You'll get the returned values and it will access/mutate reactive properties inside the VM as expected.
To use the class syntax described in the original question, we can create a simple class to wrap the vue component:
// import the component built by Vue CLI with the "library" build target
// (puts `MyComponent` in the global namespace)
import './MyComponent.umd.min.js';
import Vue from 'https://unpkg.com/vue@2/dist/vue.esm.browser.min.js';
export default class {
constructor(mountElement) {
// mount vue VM with a template ref to access its properties
const thisClass = this;
this.vm = new Vue({
components: {
MyComponent,
},
template: `
<my-component
ref="myComponent"
/>
`,
}).$mount(mountElement);
this.component = this.vm.$refs.myComponent;
}
// define methods that could call this.component's functions
someFunction() {
// do stuff
return this.component.someFunction()
}
}
It seems to work pretty well. A possible improvement would be to build the component library with a different tool, since Vue CLI v3 (with Vue v2 projects) can't output ESM module files, so the best we can do is a UMD modle that gets defined globally.