Intro

Blitzui is a tool for dynamically generating a website using already existing components and actions, giving the possibility to compose your application and change it on demand without having to re-build

In the context of Blitzui, we have two main concepts.

• Components
• Actions
• Component Pool
• Action Pool

Components: Are UI components including React components meant to be reused, the components are what we are going to use to "generate" the UI.

actions: are functions we can pass to components as props, the idea of actions is to add functionality to the UI.

Component Pools: Is where we register our components and pass them to the Blitz main function.

Action Pool: Is where we register our actions to pass them down to the Blitz main function.

By combining Components and actions, we can compose our UI and reuse it. This is very useful when having to create applications like a CMS or to generate dynamic reports with interactivity.

Basic Example

import Blitz from '@blitzui/core'

// Component Pool
const components = {
  "default": {
    "button": ({ onClick, text }) => <button onClick={onClick}>{text}</button>
  }
}


// Actions Pool
const actions = {
  default: {
    onClick: (e) => {
      console.log(e)
      alert('Hello World')
    }
  }
}


const page = [ // Most be an array
  {
    component: "h1", // HTML tags can be used
    children: "Welcome to Blitz"
  },
  {
    component: "default.button",
    props: {
      onClick: {
        action: "default.onClick",
      },
      text: "Click me"
    },
  }
]

function App() {
  const blitz = Blitz(components, actions);

  // parentComponent is optional
  const parentComponent = {component : "div" , props : {className : "parentComponent"}}

  return (
    <>
      {blitz(page, parentComponent)}
    </>
  )
}

export default App

• visit : https://blitzui.com/ for a demo page
• repo : https://github.com/isan26/blitz-demo

First steps

Let's create a component and a simple component Pool. A component Pool is a big object representing a Tree-like structure, this tree structure will be used when creating the JSON with the UI instructions.

On a newly created react app:

1. Create a folder named components on src folder
2. Create an index.js file
3. Create a TestComponent.js file
4. Copy and paste the code above to the files

// Paste on components/index.js file

import TestComponent from "./TestComponent"

export default {
    "basic": {
        "TestComponent": TestComponent
    },
}

// Paste on TestComponent.js file
import React from 'react'

const TestComponent = ({ title, textGenerator, children }) => {

    const text = textGenerator();
    return (
        <>
            <h1>{title}</h1>
            <div>{text}</div>
            {children}
        </>
    )
}

export default TestComponent

Now that we have ready our basic component pool, let's create the action pool

1. Create a folder named actions on src folder
2. Create a file index.js inside this folder
3. Create a file textGenerator.js inside this folder
4. Paste the code above into the respective files.

// Paste into index.js
import textGenerator from "./textGenerator";

export default {
    "dummy": {
        "textGenerator": textGenerator
    }
}

// Paste into textGenerator.js
function textGenerator() {
    return "Hello World";
}

export default textGenerator;

At this point we have the component pool and the actions pool, let's bring them together. Create a file named demo.json and put the following:

[
    {
        "component": "basic.TestComponent",
        "props": {
            "textGenerator": {
                "action": "dummy.textGenerator"
            },
            "title": "Title"
        },
        "children": [
            {
                "component": "span",
                "children": "I am a simple span"
            }
        ]
    }
]

This is the configuration file, and what is instructing is to print a TestComponent that can be found on the pool by going into basic.TestComponent. Pass the prop textGenerator which is an action that can be found in dummy.textGenerator (the Actions pool we already defined). Also, pass the prop title and as children, print a simple span with some text.

Bringing all together

On your App.js:

1. Import the Blitz main function
2. Import your component Pool
3. Import your actions Pool
4. Import your demo.json file
5. Pass your component pool and actions pool to the Blitz function and assign the result to a constant (will return a function).
6. Pass your config file to this function and print the results.

See the following code for reference.

import Blitz from '@blitzui/core';
import components from './components';
import actions from './actions';
import demo from './demo';

const blitz = Blitz(components, actions);

function App() {
  return (
    <div className="App">
      {blitz(demo)}
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

Executing actions

actions can be executed on the spot, meaning you won't pass the function but the value they generate. Check the following example.

//titleGenerator.js
export default function titleGenerator() {
    return "BlitzUI - Rocks";
}

//action Pool
import textGenerator from "./textGenerator";
import titleGenerator from "./titleGenerator";

export default {
    "dummy": {
        "textGenerator": textGenerator,
        "titleGenerator": titleGenerator
    }
}

[
    {
        "component": "basic.TestComponent",
        "props": {
            "textGenerator": {
                "action": "dummy.textGenerator"
            },
            "title": {
                "action": "dummy.titleGenerator",
                "execute": true
            }
        }
    }
]

This will pass the prop title, which is the value from executing the action on the spot, and the component will receive the text generated.