Dropdowns in Vue: The Right Way

#vue #javascript #ux #design

In this tutorial, we’ll go through an example of how you can implement a dropdown component using Vue. Like this:

The most common way of making a dropdown in Vue has always been this way:

First, you define a toggler (usually a <button> or an <a>) with a click event that will call a toggle method.
You define the menu with a v-if directive that is bound to an active state.
You define a method toggle that will be triggered when clicking on the toggler and change the active state to true and consequently show the menu.

Now, this way of doing is totally working and there is nothing wrong doing it. The problem is that you would need to define an active state on every component that has a dropdown. This kind of defeat the purpose of vue and the reusability of components.

I will show you my way of making dropdowns in a clean and reusable way.
I’m going to assume that you already have a vue project set up. If not, I recommend creating one using the vue-cli.

We’ll start by scaffolding out the structure of our dropdown component:

We will then create 3 components:

The AppDropdown component, which will act as the wrapper component. It will contain both the toggler and the menu.
The AppDropdownContent component, which will act as the toggable menu.
The AppDropdownItem component, which will be the actionable item inside the menu.

Let’s open the AppDropdown.vue file and write some code.

In here we’ll define a <div> that will contain the whole dropdown. We’ll add a slot with the name “toggler” and a button inside of it which will act as the default button toggle if none is provided.

Now, let’s open the AppDropdownContent.vue file.

We’ll add a <div> which will wrap the menu and use the v-if directive to only display it when it is active.

You might ask yourself: where is the active state coming from?

Here comes the fun part: We need the AppDropdownContent component to receive that value in some way. The most logical way would be from the main AppDropdown component itself. But how in the hell could we do this?

For that, we’ll use the amazing provide and inject features provided by Vue. In our case the AppDropdown will “provide” the active state and the AppDropdownContent will “inject” it in itself.

Let’s go back to our AppDropdown.vue file.

We’ll add a sharedState object to the data with the property active in it, that will be set as false by default. We’ll define a toggle() method, that will switch the active state. After that, we’ll add a @click event to the main div that will call the toggle() method. Finally, we’ll provide () the sharedState to every component inside the main AppDropdown component.

In the AppDropdownContent component, we now have the possibility to inject the sharedState provided by the AppDropdown. Let’s create a computed property active and set it’s value to the one sharedState provides.

And voilà! You now how a fully working dropdown component that is fully customizable.

But wouldn’t be nice if you didn’t need to close it by clicking on the toggle again and just click outside of it?

Fortunately, there is this great plugin called vue-clickaway that allows us to do just this. Let’s install it: npm i vue-clickaway

NB: You might want to recompile your project after the install.

We’ll add the directive provided by vue-clickaway the AppDropdown. We’ll define an away()method and call it when click away is triggered.

And that’s it! Now, you can simply add some styles to the dropdown and make it look shiny.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me on twitter @victorronnow