🦉 Observer 🦉

Owl needs to be able to react to state changes. For example, whenever the state of a component is changed, Owl needs to rerender it. To help with that, there is an Observer class. Its job is to observe the state of an object (or array), and to react to any change. The observer is implemented with the native Proxy object. Note that this means that it will not work on older browsers.

Note that the Observer is used by the useState and useContext hooks. This is the way most Owl applications will create observers. For the majority of use cases, there is no need to directly instantiate an observer.

Example

For example, this code will display update in the console:

const observer = new owl.Observer();
observer.notifyCB = () => console.log("update");
const obj = observer.observe({ a: { b: 1 } });

obj.a.b = 2;

This example shows that an observer can observe nested properties.

Reference

observe An observer can observe multiple values with the observe method. This method takes an object or an array as its argument and will return a proxy (which is mapped to the initial object/array). With this proxy, the observer can detect whenever any internal value is changed.

Registering a callback Whenever an observer sees a state change, it will call its notifyCB method. No additional information is given to the callback.

deepRevNumber Each observed value has an internal revision number, which is incremented every time the value is observed. Sometimes, it can be useful to obtain that number:

const observer = new owl.Observer();
const obj = observer.observe({ a: { b: 1 } });

observer.deepRevNumber(obj.a); // 1
obj.a.b = 2;

observer.deepRevNumber(obj.a); // 2

The deepRevNumber can also return 0, which indicates that the value is not observed.