babrahams:editable-list

v0.6.2Published 5 years ago

This package has not had recent updates. Please investigate it's current state before committing to using it in your project.

Editable Lists for Meteor

This package provides a widget for rendering the array (of strings) fields of documents as editable lists.

Example app: http://editable-text-demo.meteor.com (the tags on posts are editable lists)

Example app repo: https://github.com/JackAdams/editable-text-demo

Minimal example app: Meteorpad

Quick Start

meteor add babrahams:editable-list

You can then drop an editable list widget into any Blaze template as follows:

{{> editableList collection="posts" field="tags"}}

where "posts" is the name of the mongo collection and "tags" is the name of a document field for the posts collection (this field is an array of strings).

collection and field are the only mandatory parameters.

Note: The widget assumes that the data context is that of a single document from the posts collection (with _id value included).

You can also set the data context explicitly as follows:

{{> editableList context=singlePostDocument collection="posts" field="author"}}

where singlePostDocument can be a single post document already set in the current context, or provided by a template helper from the template that the widget was dropped into.

(You can use document, doc, object, obj, data or dataContext instead of context - go with whichever you prefer.)

Options

There are a number of parameters you can pass to the widget that affect its behaviour:

class="text-class" will change the class attribute of the span element (inside the li element) that wraps the text of a list item

style=dynamicStyle can be used if you need to have more dynamic control over the style of the span elements wrapping editable list text (use a template helper to give the dynamicStyle) e.g.

dynamicStyle : function() {
  return 'color:' + Session.get('currentColor') + ';';
} 

To set a class/style on the li element of list items, use something like liClass="my-list-item-class" or liStyle="margin: 5px 5px 0 0;". This is particularly useful for putting a margin on horizontal list items. (Don't set padding with these if you have a horizontal list -- it messes with the drag and drop. Set padding using class=... or style=....)

Use editStyle or editClass to style the input element used to edit a list item.

inputClass="input-class" will change the class attribute of the input element once the text is being edited

inputStyle=dynamicInputStyle same as above, but for the input element used for adding list items

userCanEdit=userCanEdit is a way to tell the widget whether the current user can edit the text or only view it (using a template helper) e.g.

userCanEdit : function() {
  return this.user_id === Meteor.userId();
}

(Of course, to make this work, you'll have to save your documents with a user_id field that has a value equal to Meteor.userId() of the creator.)

placeholder="New post" will be the placeholder for the input element that allows users to enter new items into the list

saveOnFocusout=false will prevent a particular widget instance from saving the text being edited on a focusout event (the default is to save the text, which can be changed via EditableList.saveOnFocusout)

trustHTML=true will make a particular widget instance render its text as HTML (default is false, which can be changed via EditableList.trustHTML)

allowPasteMultiple=true will mean that \n separated items being pasted into the input box will automatically become separate items in the list

allowDuplicates=true lets that user add items with identical text to the list (default is to not allow duplicates - i.e. use mongo's $addToSet rather than $push)

key="field-name" makes the widget assume that the field contains an array of objects rather than an array of strings; field-name is the field in the object whose (string) value gets edited; whole objects are removed from and/or added to the array by this widget, so be careful with this!

Configuration

You can change the behaviour of the widget by setting certain properties of EditableText, which is a variable exposed by babrahams:editable-text which this package builds upon.

Transactions

There is built-in support for the babrahams:transactions package, if you want everything to be undo/redo-able. To enable this:

meteor add babrahams:transactions

and in your app (in some config file on both client and server), add:

EditableText.useTransactions = true;

Or if you only want transactions on particular instances of the widget, pass useTransaction=true or useTransaction=false to override the default that was set via EditableText.useTransactions, but this will only work if you also set EditableText.clientControlsTransactions=true (by default it is false). If you set the EditableText.useTransactions value on the server, without changing EditableText.clientControlsTransactions, it doesn't matter what you set on the client (or pass from the client), you will always get the behaviour as set on the server.

Note: you can set objectTypeText="tag" to make the transaction description say "added tag" instead of "added list item". (Replace "tag" with the name of whatever type of item is in the list.)

Security

To control whether certain users can edit text on certain documents/fields, you can (and should) overwrite the function EditableText.userCanEdit (which has the data used to initialize the widget as this and the document and collection as parameters). e.g. (to only allow users to edit their own documents):

EditableText.userCanEdit = function(doc,Collection) {
  return doc.user_id === Meteor.userId();
}

Setting EditableText.useMethods=false will mean that all changes to documents are made on the client, so they are subject to the allow and deny rules you've defined for your collections. In this case, it is a good idea to make the EditableText.userCanEdit function and your allow and deny functions share the same logic to the greatest degree possible.

Note: the default setting is EditableText.useMethods=true, meaning updates are processed server side and bypass your allow and deny rules. If you're happy with this (and you should be), then all you need to do for consistency between client and server permission checks is overwrite the EditableText.userCanEdit function in a file that is shared by both client and server. Note again that this function receives the widget data context as this and the document and collection as the parameters.

Warning: if you set EditableText.useMethods=false, your data updates are being done on the client and you don't get html sanitization by default -- you'll have to sort this out or yourself via collection hooks or something. When EditableText.useMethods=true (the default setting) all data going into the database is passed through htmlSantizer.

Bigger warning: it doesn't really matter what you set EditableText.useMethods to -- you still need to lock down your collections using appropriate allow and deny rules. A malicious user can just type EditableText.useMethods=false into the browser console and this package will start making client side changes that are persisted or not entirely on the basis of your allow and deny rules.