Saptak's Blog Posts

As discussed in my last blog about ticket ordering and positioning, in this blog we are gonna talk about how we implement the front-end part of re-arranging the tickets. We essentially do it using compute and methods of Vue.js. The functionality that is expected in the front-end is, the event organizer should be able to move the tickets Up or Down the order and save that position so that it gets displayed later in that very particular order.
Like I said above we use two main things of Vue.JS for this purpose - Compute and Methods.

Compute

We use this to get the sorted list of tickets based on the position key of the tickets and use this sorted list to display the tickets in the event editing wizard. Whenever you change the value of the position for a ticket, it automatically updates the list to sorted list again and hence the order of ticket in the front-end also updates. To add a compute function in Vue.JS, inside the new Vue() object creation, we add an attribute computed and inside that we put all the functions that we are gonna use. So in our case the function is sortedTickets . We make use of the sort function of lodash to sort the tickets array based on it's position attribute.

Now while showing or looping over the tickets, we loop over sortedTickets  rather than the original ticket array.

Method

This method is called when the button is clicked to move it up or down. This makes the calculations to determine the values of the position of the two tickets which are being re-ordered in a single click. To add a method, we do it in a similar way like computed but using methods attribute instead. The methods we have written to move tickets up or down is moveTicket.

It has 3 parameters - ticket, index and direction. So when this function call is emitted, depending on the button, the direction is either "up" or "down" while the other two parameters are the ticket properties of the particular ticket. So in this function we check the direction and accordingly update the value of position for the tickets involved in the arranging. As we update the position here, because of the compute, the UI automatically updates to show the tickets in the new order.
Finally after all arrangement is done, the position is always saved in a hidden input field which is then passed as form data and is saved in the database so that the position value can be used in other pages for showing the ticket in order.

Show Ordered Ticket

In other pages, while showing ordered ticket, we already receive the ticket array in sorted format based on the position key. Hence, we don't need to worry about it in the front-end and it automatically is shown in the sorted order.