2-way data binding in native web components
No, data binding isn't part of the Web Components spec.
You can of course implement data binding yourself using native JavaScript event listeners, and possibly the Proxy object, but it's probably best not to re-invent the wheel: if you want data binding, choose one of the many JavaScript frameworks out there which supports that. Polymer, React, Angular, and Vue are some recent examples of such libraries.
I've been playing around with this over the last few days. You can create a StateObserver class, and extend your web components from that. A minimal implementation looks something like this:
// create a base class to handle state
class StateObserver extends HTMLElement {
constructor () {
super()
StateObserver.instances.push(this)
}
stateUpdate (update) {
StateObserver.lastState = StateObserver.state
StateObserver.state = update
StateObserver.instances.forEach((i) => {
if (!i.onStateUpdate) return
i.onStateUpdate(update, StateObserver.lastState)
})
}
}
StateObserver.instances = []
StateObserver.state = {}
StateObserver.lastState = {}
// create a web component which will react to state changes
class CustomReactive extends StateObserver {
onStateUpdate (state, lastState) {
if (state.someProp === lastState.someProp) return
this.innerHTML = `input is: ${state.someProp}`
}
}
customElements.define('custom-reactive', CustomReactive)
class CustomObserved extends StateObserver {
connectedCallback () {
this.querySelector('input').addEventListener('input', (e) => {
this.stateUpdate({ someProp: e.target.value })
})
}
}
customElements.define('custom-observed', CustomObserved)<custom-observed>
<input>
</custom-observed>
<br />
<custom-reactive></custom-reactive>fiddle here
I like this approach because it occurs directly between precisely those elements you want to communicate with, no dom traversal to find data- properties or whatever.
Object.observe is a potential new way to do databinding in javascript. This feature is scheduled for Ecmascript 7(javascript), but some browsers currently support it, check here. Also check out this html5rocks article on object.observe