wire-replace

This package adds a new directive to Livewire: wire:replace. The directive is useful for solving DOM diffing issues.

For example, if you have the following template:

<div>
    Showing
    <span class="font-medium">{{ $paginator->firstItem() }}</span>
    to
    <span class="font-medium">{{ $paginator->lastItem() }}</span>
    of
    <span class="font-medium">{{ $paginator->total() }}</span>
    results
</div>

The numbers will eventually merge into a single value if you update the component's data a few times.

To solve this, you'd wrap all of those free-floating strings in <span>s. And sure, it would work here.

But:

• it's ugly
• it won't work in situations where you display template that you don't have control over (translated templates, rich text added by users, ...)

A better solution is to have a directive that tells Livewire to always replace the element. Sort of like an opposite to wire:ignore.

Usage

This package adds two extremely simple directives: wire:replace and wire:replace.self. Simply use them on elements that you want fully replaced.

To tell Livewire that the element's children should always be replaced:

<div wire:replace>
    Showing
    ...
</div>

To tell Livewire that the element itself plus its children should always be replaced:

<div wire:replace.self>
    Showing
    ...
</div>

Installation

npm dependency

Install the package:

npm install --dev @leanadmin/wire-replace

Register the directive in your app.js file:

import wire_replace from '@leanadmin/wire-replace';

window.Livewire.hook(...wire_replace);

CDN

Simply include the JS file in your layout (after Livewire's scripts) and the directive will automatically register itself.

@livewireScripts

<script src="https://unpkg.com/@leanadmin/[email protected]/dist/wire_replace.js"></script>

Performance

Livewire doesn't expose its internal morphdom class which would allow us to just tell morphdom to stop diffing the current tree if when it encounters an element with a wire:replace attribute.

So instead, we hook into Livewire's element.updating event and we replace the target element fully with the new element, before Livewire/morphdom can attempt more intelligent diffs.

This is likely less performant than hooking into morphdom's events, but in most cases it won't matter. The main use case of this package is small bits of templates where Livewire can't figure things out itself and wire:key doesn't help. And for that, it works completely smoothly.