Exploring a todo app with core.async

We’re going to build an equivalent of the AngularJS TODO example using core.async, and a templating library, papadom, that I’ve written to help in this.

Clojurescript recently gained a CSP implemetation via core.async, similar to Go’s channels, or CML’s channels (CML also has a nice select). Bruce Haumann started exploring this with ClojureScript Core.Async Todos, and David Nolen has been looking at how to use core.async for responsive design. In this post, we’ll take the TODO example, and take it a little further.

Basic Display

We’ll start with just displaying a list of todo items. For this we’ll need a template, so we’ll just write this in HTML, and add a t-template attribute, which enables us to use mustache style templating of values to display. This doesn’t use mustache sections for looping, in order to preserve valid HTML markup.

<h1>TODOS</h1> <ul class="unstyled"> <li t-template="todos">{{text}}</li> </ul>

To get this to show something we’ll need some code:

(ns app (:require [papadom.template :refer [compile-templates render]])) (defn start [] (compile-templates) (render {:todos [{:text "learn papadom" :done false} {:text "write a papadom app" :done false}]}))

When you call app.start() from the page containing the above template, you’ll see a list of two todo entries.

Adding an event

Now we have something displayed, lets add a checkbox to mark todo items as done:

<ul class="unstyled"> <li t-template="todos"> <input type="checkbox" t-prop="done" t-event="done" t-id="index" index="{{@index}}"> <span>{{text}}</span> </li> </ul>

The t-prop attribute tells the template to which data value to display as the checkbox.

The t-event attribute specifies that we want an event. When the checkbox is clicked, we will get a core.async message with a :done event type. We need to know which todo was clicked, so we use the t-id attribute to list the attributes whose values should be sent as the event data – in this case the index, which has a value based on handlebars style @index property.

Now we need some code to process the events. To do this we’ll define an app function that will be passed a state atom containing a map with our todos state, and a core.async channel from which to read events. The function will loop over events, and dispatch them as required.

(defn app [state event-chan] (go (loop [[event event-data] (<! event-chan)] (case event :done (let [nv (boolean (:checked event-data))] (swap! state assoc-in [:todos (:index event-data) :done] nv))) (recur (<! event-chan)))))

When the app function receives a :done event, it will update the state atom appropriately. Now we have our state updating, we’ll need to display it, which we can again do with the render function.

(defn show-state [state] (render "state" state))

We still need to get show-state called, and we’ll arrange this in a modified start function. This will create an atom for the state, and add a watch on the atom that will call show-state .

(defn start [] (let [event-chan (chan) state (atom nil)] (compile-templates) (template-events event-chan) (add-watch state :state (fn [key ref old new] (show-state new))) (reset! state {:todos [{:text "Learn papadom" :done false} {:text "Build a papadom app" :done false}]}) (app state event-chan))))

We’ve also added a core.async channel, event-chan , which we’ve passed to template-events to arrange delivery of the events defined in our template. We pass this channel to the app function to start processing the events.

This shows the basic structure of the application.

Adding New Todo Elements

To allow you to add new todo items, we’ll add a form to our template, specifying a t-event attribute, which will cause an event to be sent when the form is submitted, with the form’s input values as the event data.

<form t-event="add-todo"> <input type="text" t-prop="text" size="30" placeholder="add new todo here"> <input class="btn btn-primary" type="submit" value="add"> </form>

To process this new event, we’ll add a case to the app function loop’s case form.

:add-todo (swap! state update-in [:todos] conj {:text (:text (input-seq->map event-data)) :done false})

This uses the input-seq->map helper to convert the data from the form into a map, and we extract the :text value (defined by t-prop in the input element).

And we’re done. To see a full working example have a look at the template and code in the todo example of papadom. To run the example: