View hooks

General description

All engines can define their own view hooks, and register to other engines' ones. This allows engines to add content to views rendered by other engines. This will be clearer with an example.

Take the homepage, for example. It is rendered by the decidim-core. We want to show there a list of highlighted participatory spaces (processes and assemblies). We cannot be sure the final app has these engines, so we need to check they exist:

<% if defined? Decidim::Processes %>
  <% # iterate through the most important ones %>
<% end %>
<% if defined? Decidim::Assemblies %>
  <% # iterate through the most important ones %>
<% end %>

This raises two important issues:

We are linking decidim-core with decidim-assemblies and decidim-participatory_processes. This is not perfect.
The final app cannot extend this view to add more content in a simple way. The developers could overwrite the view, but this raises maintainability problems, as upgrades will be harder.

Rendering view hooks

Instead of the previous example, we created the concept of "view hooks". Think of them as a registry of views which can be defined by a given engine and extended by others. To follow the previous example, we would register a view hook in decidim-core:

<%= Decidim.view_hooks.render(:highlighted_elements, deep_dup) %>

We’re rendering the view hooks registered as :highlighted_elements. The deep_dup parameter is a deep copy of the view context, we will analyze it later.

Registering view hooks

Other engines would register blocks of Ruby and Rails code from their initializers. For example, in decidim-participatory_processes:

# decidim-participatory_processes/lib/decidim/participatory_processes/engine.rb
initializer "decidim_participatory_processes.view_hooks" do
  Decidim.view_hooks.register(:highlighted_elements) do |view_context|
    view_context.render(partial: "my/partial")
  end
end

In order to register a view hook we need the hook name and a block of Ruby code. We’re registering a view hook as :highlighted-elements, following our example. We’re passing a deep copy of the view context to the block so that we can use our views helper methods there, and we’re rendering a partial. We could write ActiveRecord queries and pass the results to the partial as locals if we wanted a more complex view:

# decidim-participatory_processes/lib/decidim/participatory_processes/engine.rb
initializer "decidim_participatory_processes.view_hooks" do
  Decidim.view_hooks.register(:highlighted_elements) do |view_context|
    highlighted_processes =
      OrganizationPublishedParticipatoryProcesses.new(view_context.current_organization) | HighlightedParticipatoryProcesses.new

    view_context.render(partial: "decidim/participatory_processes/my/partial", locals: { highlighted_processes: highlighted_processes })
  end
end

We’re passing a deep copy of the view context to allow us to extend it without polluting the original view context:

# decidim-proposals/lib/decidim/proposals/engine.rb
initializer "decidim_participatory_processes.view_hooks" do
  Decidim.view_hooks.register(:participatory_space_highlighted_elements) do |view_context|
    # ...
    view_context.extend Decidim::Proposals::ApplicationHelper
    view_context.render(partial: "decidim/participatory_spaces/highlighted_proposals", locals: { })
  end
end

When registering a view hook, we can set a priority for each one. By default, all view hooks are registered with low priority, but we can change it:

Decidim.view_hooks.register(:highlighted_elements, priority: Decidim::ViewHooks::HIGH_PRIORITY) do |view_context|
  # ...
end

Enabling view hooks in your engine

Ideally, each engine should hold their own instance of Decidim::ViewHooks. This means that if decidim-participatory_processes wants to allow part of its views to be extended by other engines, it should define Decidim::ParticipatoryProcesses.view_hooks, and other engines should register to this instance.

The engine I want to extend does not support view hooks, what can I do?

First of all, send a PR to the engine to add the view hook you need. Expose your needs, so the developers can assess a view hook is the best solution. Sometimes a view hook can be replaced with another abstraction, or another UI. Meanwhile, you can use deface to extend a view file without replacing it. Be careful, since deface is very powerful and can be a double-edged sword. We considered adding deface to decidim, but found that it opened to a code that would be much harder to maintain.

View hooks drawbacks and alternatives

View hooks allow components to extend the views of other components without coupling, but they cannot be sorted by the user, and cannot hold options. Consider checking the content blocks abstraction for a more configurable setup.