url-for helper

[GavinJoyce]

Link to rendered

[rwjblue]

👍 - I personally prefer 'url-for' (because this is useful for more things than just hrefs).

I'd also like to see a 'url-is-active' helper for similar reasons (it could fit in this RFC, but I'm fine with it being a separate one also).

[rwjblue]

Also, I'd like to see Ember.LinkComponent be changed around to provide all of its functionality via public template helpers (possibly when it is implemented as a glimmer component). This 'url-for'/'href-to' helper is a great start towards that goal...

[GavinJoyce]

Thanks, I agree that url-for is a better name. I'd be happy to roll in url-is-active into this RFC too, they are very much related

[stefanpenner]

wouldn't the solution to ^ be to make link-to not slow? This seems like it would have a much greater impact.

[GavinJoyce]

Yes, the faster that link-to is, the less our need for something like this. We've found the href-to addon to be 6-12x times faster in Ember 1.11-1.13 though. link-to will always have much more to do, all href-to has to do is to generate a URL.

[rwjblue]

We should definitely make link-to faster, but the two ideas are not opposed to each other. For example, one way to make it faster is to have it take advantage of template helpers like this one.

[stefanpenner]

my point was, we don't normally except joe turbo features, when the core primitive is still more or less unoptimized. So that being a primary motivation may give the wrong impression.

As i mentioned, the more compelling motivation should be to de-sugar link-to, this will:

• prevent link-to from continuing to be a junk drawer
• allow us to use new templating features to make the component parts faster (but they should also then in-tern make link-to better/faster)
• enable more experimentation

[GavinJoyce]

I'll rewrite the motivation section to emphasise these points. Thanks

[stefanpenner]

I suspect a sibling RFC (or maybe part of this one) should explore the extracting other parts of link to. Such as the classes that are associated with a URL. active/loading/current etc. The reason i suggest this, is to ensure a uniform experience between the component parts.

With that in-place, link-to may easily just become a sugaring of its component parts. It could even become just an HTMLBars transform, with nearly no overhead. All while exposing the building blocks as public api.

[GavinJoyce]

I've renamed the helper to url-for and rewrote the motivations sections to better capture both your suggestions:

Decomposing `link-to` into a set of helpers will allow us to simplify its internals
while providing new low level primitives for use in performance sensitive 
applications. `url-for`, the first of these extracted helpers, will allow for simple 
URL rendering in an Ember application. Extracting separate helpers for dealing 
with link classes will be suggested in a future RFC.

This proposal would also allow plain URLs to be used within an Ember application 
without triggering an application reload. For example, a url such as `/about` 
could be used within a template or helper.

In order to keep it small, I've kept this focused on url-for. The other class helpers can follow once we've got agreement on this one.

[rwjblue]

Slight nit-pick: I personally wouldn't call this a relative url since it includes a leading slash.

[GavinJoyce]

thanks

[stefanpenner]

The other class helpers can follow once we've got agreement on this one.

👍

[tomdale]

Awesome first step. My feeling is that this functionality should likely be specced out as part of a routing service, and the url-for helper should just be a small wrapper exposing that to Handlebars-land. Perhaps the first iteration of the public routing service just exposes urlFor and transitionTo methods and we can build from there.

[chadhietala]

This will make links within i18n strings much easier so 👍 . For example we use a i18n string format based on Java xmsg (Yahoo uses something similar but standardized) and our helper looks something like.

<!-- define the string -->
{{t-def 'hello_world' text='Hello {Hello :name, click this <a href={:link}>Link</a>'}}

<!-- Use string -->
<h1>{{t 'hello_world' name=name link=(url-for 'profile' 123) }}</h1>

Definitely a need for this type of primitive.

[MiguelMadero]

I was thinking the same. Let's build on top of the routingService.

[Turbo87]

has there been any progress on this? I need a similar solution to what @chadhietala described and it would be awesome if ember would provide this out of the box.

[rwjblue]

Closing this in favor of #95.

Thanks for opening @GavinJoyce, hoping to land the router service RFC which should include this helper soon.