A tour of how the Widget (Virtual DOM) code in Discourse works

Dev
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Right, after a lot of headaches I’ve got it working - thanks for the help! :tada:

The two other problems I hit which could possibly do with some re-engineering in the widget code:

  • When setting dirtyKeys, it only re-renders the first widget with that buildKey. I’ve got around that by adding the post-id to the post-avatar’s buildKey so that every buildKey is unique
  • Setting the dirtyKey doesn’t work if the widget you want to re-render is inside another widget. In my case the post-avatar is inside a post. I think this is because of the shadowTree stuff.
    It would be really nice if the widget code could work out that the widget is deep in the tree and re-render its parents. I’ve got around this by setting the post widget as dirty as well.

https://github.com/davidtaylorhq/discourse-whos-online/blob/0437d7f2c8f9e396416e66f0a306b4e9377fc389/assets/javascripts/discourse/initializers/start-whos-online.js.es6#L88-L101

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