Inspired by Rails 7.1 beta Normalization API

[omarluq]

Inspired by Rails 7.1 beta normalization API I think View Components can benefit from similar hooks that triggers on before_render
e.g.

class MyComponent <  ApplicationComponent
  def initialize(str)
    @str = str.downcase
  end
end

becomes

class MyComponent <  ApplicationComponent
  normalize :str, with: -> str { str.downcase }
  def initialize(str)
    @str = str
  end
end

This will allow an elegant way to normalize data that needs access to the view context such as i18n translations.
It will also make it easier for people stuck on view component V2.6 and less which allowed using the view context in the instantiation of the components to migrate their code to newer versions without introducing so much boilerplate to move the code for instantiation to before render.
e.g.
i.g.

class MyComponent <  ApplicationComponent
  def initialize(str)
    @str = str
  end
  
  def normalized_str
    i18n.t(@str)
  end
end

becomes

class MyComponent <  ApplicationComponent
  normalize :str, with: -> str { i18n.t(str) }

  def initialize(str)
    @str = str
  end
end

I'm willing to code the feature if you all are open to it.

[Spone]

Hi! Thanks for the suggestion. This new normalize API in Rails 7.1 will indeed prove quite useful in models!
I'm not really sure what the use cases would be in ViewComponents though, can you elaborate a bit on what kind of data would be normalized? It would be great you can provide real world examples. I can't think of anything in my own apps that could benefit from this, so I'm curious about that.

[boardfish]

Does Rails make this available by way of a module? If that were the case, folks could include it in ApplicationComponent. (I haven't read up on this, so I might answer this question myself soon.)

[omarluq]

Yeah I believe its just an ActiveSupport::Concern but it wouldn't map 1 to 1 for view components.

[Spone]

Yes it's the ActiveRecord::Normalization concern, which relies on the ActiveModel Attributes API, so I don't think we can use it directly in ViewComponents.

[boardfish]

It'd be possible for folks to include both models if they wanted to use this, though, right?

I don't think we want to be too prescriptive about which library folks should use to define attributes, if at all. But this thread should serve as good documentation that if you do want to use Normalization, you could do so if you wished by including both modules and then calling before_render { self.class.normalized_attributes.each(&method(:normalize_attribute)) }.

[reeganviljoen]

@omarluq I would also suggest maybe suggesting this to view_component_contrib as they generally do these kinds of features