WET-BOEW-REACT

🚨🚨 DISCLAIMER 🚨🚨

This library is in use at several Government of Canada departments; however, it remains an independent, experimental, open source project that is not officially supported or endorsed by the Government of Canada at this time. Use at your own risk.

📔 Click here for full documentation

WET-BOEW-REACT (WBR) is a component library that enables web developers to use the Government of Canada's Web Experience Toolkit (WET) and Centrally Deployed Template System (CDTS) with React JS, including Create React App and NextJS.

Contents

• Quickstart
  • CRA
  • NextJS
• Create React App from scratch
• NextJS from Scratch
• Architecture

Quickstart

The fastest way to get started is to clone this library's github repository, copy one of the example projects to a new folder and start editing.

Current example projects include:

• create-react-app example – Create React App with react-router-dom and react-i18next.
• nextjs example – NextJS App with next-i18next and TypeScript.

Using the Create-React-App example as a starting point

mkdir my-app
cd my-app
git clone https://github.com/arcnovus/wet-boew-x.git temp
cp -r temp/examples/create-react-app/* .
rm -rf temp

Using the NextJS example as a starting point

mkdir my-app
cd my-app
git clone https://github.com/arcnovus/wet-boew-x.git temp
cp -r temp/examples/nextjs/* .
rm -rf temp

Then, you can start editing the files in the src folder.

Create React App from scratch

Open a terminal and use Create React App (CRA) to bootstrap a new React application and then install wet-boew-react.

npx create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npm i @arcnovus/wet-boew-react

Open your new app with your favorite code editor and replace the contents of src/App.js with the code below:

import {
  DefaultTemplate,
  PageTitle,
  SplashTemplate,
  WetProvider,
  useLanguage,
} from "@arcnovus/wet-boew-react";

export default function App() {
  const { currentLanguage } = useLanguage();
  const labels = {
    en: {
      title: "My Title",
      contents: "Hello, World!",
    },
    fr: {
      title: "Mon Titre",
      contents: "Bonjour!",
    },
  };

  return (
    <WetProvider>
      {currentLanguage == null ? (
        <SplashTemplate />
      ) : (
        <DefaultTemplate>
          <PageTitle text={labels[currentLanguage].title} />
          <p>{labels[currentLanguage].contents}</p>
        </DefaultTemplate>
      )}
    </WetProvider>
  );
}

Go back to your terminal window and preview your app with the following command.

npm run start

NextJS from Scratch (TypeScript)

1. Open a terminal and use NextJS to bootstrap a new NextJS application and then install wet-boew-react and next-transpile-modules.

npx create-next-app my-app --typescript
cd my-app
npm i @arcnovus/wet-boew-react next-transpile-modules [email protected] [email protected]
npm i @types/node -D

2. Open next.config.js with your favorite code editor and replace the contents with:

/** @type {import('next').NextConfig} */
const withTM = require("next-transpile-modules")(["@arcnovus/wet-boew-react"]);
const nextConfig = {
  reactStrictMode: true,
  i18n: {
    defaultLocale: "en",
    locales: ["en", "fr"],
  },
};
module.exports = withTM(nextConfig);

3. Open pages/_app.tsx with your favorite code editor and replace the contents with:

import type { AppProps } from "next/app";
import { useCallback, useEffect, useState } from "react";
import { WetProvider, Language } from "@arcnovus/wet-boew-react";
import { useRouter } from "next/router";

export default function WetForNextJsAppp({ Component, pageProps }: AppProps) {
  const [isServerSide, setIsServerSide] = useState(true);
  const router = useRouter();
  const currentLanguage =
    (router.locale?.split("-")[0] as Language) ?? Language.EN;
  const handleLink = useCallback(
    (a: HTMLAnchorElement) => {
      const relativeUrl = a.href.replace(window.location.origin, "");
      const asUrl = `/${currentLanguage}${relativeUrl}`;
      router.push(relativeUrl, asUrl, {
        shallow: false,
        locale: router.locale,
      });
    },
    [router, currentLanguage]
  );

  useEffect(() => {
    setIsServerSide(false);
  }, []);

  // this will suppress the useLayoutEffect warnings.
  if (isServerSide) {
    // You can show some kind of placeholder UI here
    return null;
  }

  return (
    <WetProvider language={currentLanguage} linkHandler={handleLink}>
      <Component {...pageProps} />
    </WetProvider>
  );
}

4. Modify pages/index.tsx to match the following:

import { SplashTemplate } from "@arcnovus/wet-boew-react";

export default function Index() {
  const labels = {
    en: {
      appName: "My NextJS app.",
    },
    fr: {
      appName: "Mon application NextJS.",
    },
  };

  return (
    <SplashTemplate
      nameEng={labels.en.appName}
      nameFra={labels.fr.appName}
      indexEng="/en/home"
      indexFra="/fr/home"
    />
  );
}

5. Create a new file at pages/home.tsx with the following contents:

import {
  AppTemplate,
  PageTitle,
  useLngLinks,
  Language,
} from "@arcnovus/wet-boew-react";
import { GetStaticProps } from "next";
import { useRouter } from "next/router";

export default function Home() {
  const router = useRouter();
  const currentLanguage =
    (router.locale?.split("-")[0] as Language) ?? Language.EN;
  const { lngLinks } = useLngLinks({
    currentLanguage,
    translatedPage: `/${
      currentLanguage == Language.EN ? Language.FR : Language.EN
    }/home/`,
  });

  const labels = {
    en: {
      title: "My NextJS app",
      intro: "Welcome",
    },
    fr: {
      title: "Mon application NextJS.",
      intro: "Bienvenue",
    },
  };

  return (
    <AppTemplate
      appName={[{ text: labels[currentLanguage].title, href: "/home" }]}
      lngLinks={lngLinks}
    >
      <PageTitle text={labels[currentLanguage].title} />
      <p>{labels[currentLanguage].intro}</p>
    </AppTemplate>
  );
}

Go back to your terminal window and preview your app with the following command.

npm run dev

Next Steps

Consider integrating next-18next for better bilingual support.

Changing the layout of your app.

WBR includes five core template components which can all be configured to achieve a variety of layouts.

The included templates are:

• SplashTemplate - the default Canada.ca language selection splash page template.
• DefaultTemplate - the default Canada.ca template.
• DefaultSecMenuTemplate - the default Canada.ca template with a left side navigation.
• AppTemplate - the CDTS application template.
• AppSecMenuTemplate - the CDTS application template with a left side navigation.

To use a different template, simply import it from "@arcnovus/wet-boew-react" and wrap your page with it. For example, you could change the Getting Started code from above to use the App template, like so:

import {
  AppTemplate,
  PageTitle,
  SplashTemplate,
  WetProvider,
  useLanguage,
} from "../src";

export default function Index() {
  const { currentLanguage } = useLanguage();
  const labels = {
    en: {
      title: "My Title",
      contents: "Hello, World!",
      appName: "My awesome app.",
    },
    fr: {
      title: "Mon Titre",
      contents: "Bonjour!",
      appName: "Mon application merveilleux.",
    },
  };

  return (
    <WetProvider>
      {currentLanguage == null ? (
        <SplashTemplate />
      ) : (
        <AppTemplate
          appName={[
            {
              href: "/",
              text: labels[currentLanguage].appName,
            },
          ]}
        >
          <PageTitle text={labels[currentLanguage].title} />
          <p>{labels[currentLanguage].contents}</p>
        </AppTemplate>
      )}
    </WetProvider>
  );
}

Architecture

The wet-boew-react library consumes a more general library called wet-boew-utils. The wet-boew-utils library provides a set of plain TypeScript utilities for integrating the Government of Canada's Web Experience Toolkit (WET) and the Centrally Deployed Template System (CDTS) into applications built using modern web frameworks like React, VueJS, Svelte, or Angular.

These libraries do not attempt to rewrite or re-implement WET and CDTS, instead they consume all of the existing functionality from those projects and makes them easier to use in a modern application.

WET-BOEW-REACT

The wet-boew-react library is written in TypeScript and JSX/React. It provides the following:

• A <WetProvider> component that wraps your application and takes care of injecting all required javascript and css for WET and CDTS. With this component, developers no longer need to manually modify their index.html file to include any <script> or <link> tags for WET or CDTS.
• Components that provide the three major templates supported by CDTS:
  • <SplashTemplate>for the standard Government of Canada bilingual splash page;
  • <DefaultTemplate> for the standard Canada.ca layout with the "mega menu" and standard footer; and,
  • <AppTemplate> for the more application focused layouts provided by the CDTS.
  • These template components strive to follow the same conventions as the CDTS components meaning that they accept the attibutes for the various CDTS sections (e.g. refTop, refFooter, etc...) as props to these components.
• A variety of common WET elements such as buttons, alerts, tables, and so on implemented as React components by leveraging the existing WET CSS and JavaScript libraries and following the code examples in the WET style guide.

WET-BOEW-REACT is Free Open Source software and is available under the MIT license. Full source code is available here.

WET-BOEW-UTILS

The wet-boew-utils library is written in TypeScript and provides the following:

• A CDTS Injector function that can inject all CDTS dependencies into a modern single page application, including: jQuery, Soy Utils, the language appropriate WET JavaScript library, and anything else needed by CDTS.

• An onAnchorClick function that allows modern frameworks to intercept <a> tags injected by CDTS and handle them properly.

• A registerWetComponent function that allows components to register themselves with the WET JavaScript library. This is useful for when a modern framework inserts WET components into the DOM that need to be modified by WET (for example, the DataTable component).

• Some language utility functions that make it easier to add bilingual support in a modern application.

WET-BOEW-UTILS is Free Open Source software and is available under the MIT license. Full source code is available here.

CDTS

The Government of Canada's Centrally Deployed Template System (CDTS)

WET

The Government of Canada's Web Experience Toolkit (WET)