Updates for December 2024

The last two months have been marked by a lot of new updates coming into the framework. Some of them include:

• Enhancements to the Forms package, which we talked about earlier on our LinkedIn post.
• New capabilities added to the framework such as: using events to communicate between features and plugins, modifiers to specifically wrap content items just before getting rendered.
• Refactoring of plugins to make them more modular and easier to use.
• Separating some of the methods in the AnalyticsPlugin into a TelemetryPlugin.
• Use of Scoped DI to isolate the scoping of dependencies only within a Widget tree. Currently, this is available within a Route. This ensures that the global DI container is not affected by dependencies that have a limited lifetime.
• Ability to set default layouts for various ContentItems. This allows you to swap with your Design-System specific variants and simplifies managing layouts on the CMS as well.
• Added some tests to the vyuh_core package.
• Added the ability to post large queries on Sanity Client. It will automatically switch to a POST request if the query size exceeds 11Kb.

Let’s see some of these in more detail.

Forms Package Enhancements

The Forms package has been enhanced to support multistep forms. This is a common use-case in many applications where you need to break down a form into multiple steps. This is now possible with the Forms package. You can see a demo of these features in the below video. It includes:

• Adding a form with multiple steps.
• Reordering steps, reordering fields within a step
• Showing completion percentage
• Navigating between steps
• Validating the form
• Saving drafts
• Submitting the form

Events for Communication

Any respectable UI framework includes events to communicate between different aspects of your application. In our case, we would need a way in which features could communicate with each other and also to have communication channels between plugins and features. This is now enabled through type-safe events, which you can explore on our documentation site.

Modifiers

Modifiers are new abstractions introduced into the framework that allow you to wrap the Widget, the output of the layout step. Modifiers are set up as an array, so you pass through a sequence of these modifiers before it renders the content item. This allows the individual modifiers to add visual enrichments to the content item, which will be pretty useful in some cases and pretty powerful as well.

The input to the modifier is the output of the layout phase, which is the Flutter Widget. After passing through the sequence of modifiers, the output comes out as a Widget, visually enriched by each of these modifiers.

The advantage of the modifiers is that you could apply a single, consistent visual change across all the content items without creating custom layouts for each of those content items.

Currently, the framework includes a ThemeModifier that allows you to attach a custom theme to individual content items or at the route level. This allows you surgically apply light and dark themes at a content level or even at the route level.

Read more about modifiers on the documentation site.

Splitting the AnalyticsPlugin into TelemetryPlugin

The Analytics plugin had been taking on a lot of responsibility in terms of capturing user analytics and also doing telemetry operations (reporting errors and Flutter errors and messages and traces, etc.).

We felt that all of these additional functionalities really belonged to a separate plugin - the Telemetry plugin. This split has now been applied, so the Analytics plugin focuses on reporting user-level events (taps, views, scrolls and domain specific events). All the other functionality in terms of reporting errors and traces has been moved into the telemetry plugin. Both of these plugins are required plugins, and we have defaults implementations available at the framework level.

We now have a vyuy.analytics and vyuh.telemetry API that gives you access to these plugin instances at runtime.

Summary

This is a brief overview of the updates that have been made to the framework. We are excited to see how these new capabilities will be used by our users. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us on our GitHub repository. We are always looking for ways to improve the framework and make it more user-friendly.