🦉 Utils 🦉

Owl export a few useful utility functions, to help with common issues. Those functions are all available in the owl.utils namespace.

Content

• whenReady: executing code when DOM is ready
• loadJS: loading script files
• loadFile: loading a file (useful for templates)
• escape: sanitizing strings
• debounce: limiting rate of function calls
• shallowEqual: shallow object comparison

whenReady

The function whenReady returns a Promise resolved when the DOM is ready (if not ready yet, resolved directly otherwise). If called with a callback as argument, it executes it as soon as the DOM ready (or directly).

Promise.all([loadFile("templates.xml"), owl.utils.whenReady()]).then(function ([templates]) {
  const qweb = new owl.QWeb({ templates });
  const app = new App({ qweb });
  app.mount(document.body);
});

or alternatively:

owl.utils.whenReady(function () {
  const qweb = new owl.QWeb();
  const app = new App({ qweb });
  app.mount(document.body);
});

loadJS

loadJS takes a url (string) for a javascript resource, and loads it (by adding a script tag in the document head). It returns a promise, so the caller can properly reacts when it is ready. Also, it is smart: it maintains a list of urls previously loaded (or currently being loaded), and prevent doing twice the work.

For example, it is useful for lazy loading external libraries:

class MyComponent extends owl.Component {
  willStart() {
    return owl.utils.loadJS("/static/libs/someLib.js");
  }
}

loadFile

loadFile is a helper function to fetch a file. It simply performs a GET request and returns the resulting string in a promise. The initial usecase for this function is to load a template file. For example:

async function makeEnv() {
  const templates = await owl.utils.loadFile("templates.xml");
  const qweb = new owl.QWeb({ templates });
  return { qweb };
}

Note that unlike loadJS, this function returns the content of the file as a string. It does not add a script tag or any other side effect.

escape

Sometimes, we need to display dynamic data (for example user-generated data) in the user interface. If this is done by a QWeb template, it is not an issue:

    <div><t t-esc="user.data"/></div>

The QWeb engine will create a div node and add the content of the user.data string as a text node, so the web browser will not parse it as html. However, it may be a problem if this is done with some javascript code like this:

class BadComponent extends Component {
  // some template with a ref to a div
  // some code ...

  mounted() {
    this.divRef.el.innerHTML = this.state.value;
  }
}

In this case, the content of the div will be parsed as html, which may inject unwanted behaviour. To fix this, the escape function will simply transform a string into an escaped version of the same string, which will be properly displayed by the browser, but which will not be parsed as html (for example, "<ok>" is escaped to the string: "<ok>"). So, the bad example above can be fixed with the following change:

this.divRef.el.innerHTML = owl.utils.escape(this.state.value);

debounce

The debounce function is useful when we want to limit the number of times some function/action is perfomed. For example, this may be useful to prevent issue with people double clicking on a button.

It takes three arguments:

• func (function): this is the function that will be rate limited
• wait (number): this is the number of milliseconds that we want to use to rate limit the function func
• immediate (optional, boolean, default=false): if immediate is true, the function will be triggered immediately (leading edge of the interval). If false, the function will be triggered at the end (trailing edge).

It returns a function. For example:

const debounce = owl.utils.debounce;
window.addEventListener("mousemove", debounce(doSomething, 100));

As this example shows, it is usualy useful for event handlers which are triggered very quickly, such as scroll or mousemove events.

shallowEqual

This function checks if two objects have the same values assigned to each keys:

shallowEqual({ a: 1, b: 2 }, { a: 1, b: 2 }); // true
shallowEqual({ a: 1, b: 2 }, { a: 1, b: 3 }); // false

However, for performance reasons, it assumes that the two objects have the same keys. If we are in a situation where this is not guaranteed, the following code will work:

const completeShallowEqual = (a, b) => shallowEqual(a, b) && shallowEqual(b, a);