Using Angular with Headless API

The React API for working with the Headless API includes three main things:

• PlasmicComponentLoader instance that is used to load design data from Plasmic.
• <PlasmicRootProvider /> component that sits near the root of your React application, and provides a place for you to inject pre-fetched data, as well as specify global variants.
• <PlasmicComponent /> component that renders a component designed in Plasmic; allows you to configure what variants to target, slot contents to use, and event handlers to add.

PlasmicComponentLoader

An instance of PlasmicComponentLoader is returned by initPlasmicLoader(). This should be a global singleton in your app; it can be passed into the <PlasmicRootProvider/> component, and be used to dynamically fetch component data.

initPlasmicLoader()

This function takes in an object with these keys as the argument:

Specifying project version

By default, PlasmicComponent will fetch and render the latest published version of your project. These published versions have been optimized and will be served over CDNs.

If you want a specific published version instead of the latest published version, you can explicitly specify it like so:

export const PLASMIC = initPlasmicLoader({
  projects: [
    {
      id: '...',
      token: '...',
      version: '2.1.3'
    }
  ]
});

Previewing latest changes during development

During development, however, you may wish to render the latest unpublished changes, instead of the latest published version, so you can see changes in your development server as you make updates in Plasmic studio. In that case, you can pass a preview flag:

export const PLASMIC = initPlasmicLoader({
  projects: [
    {
      id: '...',
      token: '...'
    }
  ],
  preview: true
});

Note that preview: true will take longer and serve less optimized code! Only use this for development.

PlasmicComponentLoader.fetchComponentData()

This method fetches data needed to render the specified components. It takes any number of arguments; each argument can be either:

• A string corresponding to either the name of a component or the path of a page
• An object {name: 'name_or_path', projectId: '...'} if there are multiple components of the same name across different projects.

For example,

const data = await PLASMIC.fetchComponentData('/', 'LoginForm');

The specified components are ‘entrypoints’; components that are used by those entrypoints are automatically included, so you don’t need to provide an exhaustive list of components to fetch.

If you’ve specified a component name that Plasmic doesn’t know about, an error is thrown.

This function returns an object like this:

{
  entryCompMetas: [
    // There's one object here for each entrypoint you
    // specified in your call to fetchComponentData()
    {
      id: "...", // unique identifier
      name: "ComponentName", // normalized name of component
      displayName: "Component Name", // display name of component
      isPage: true, // true if it corresponds to a page
      pageMetadata: {
        // This object exists if isPage is true
        path: "/page", // path for this page

        // The page metadata below can be used to embed into your
        // <head/> tag
        title: "My Page", // title of the page if set
        description: "This is me!", // description of the page if set
        openGraphImageUrl: "...", // url of open graph image
      },
      // Studio users can attach arbitrary key-value metadata to any page/component.
      metadata: {
        isStagingOnly: "true",
        keywords: "seo, search, engine, optimization, rank, pagerank",
        customTargeting: "audience=women, repeatbuyer=true",
        // ...
      }
    }
  ],
  remoteFontUrls: [
    // Remote URLS that can be used to load fonts that you need
    // in your projects.  By default, `PlasmicComponent` will
    // already include the fonts you need, but you can use this
    // information to try to pre-load them in your site if
    // you'd like.
    "https://fonts.google.com/..."
  ],
  bundle: {
    // There is one entry here per project, including projects that are imported dependencies.
    projects: [
      {
        id: "Q62yQ3x2m25QvuUT8iBcZm",
        // true if this was a dependency, false if it was an explicitly requested project
        indirect: false,
        name: "My Project",
        teamId: "yQ3x2m25QvuUT8iBcZmQ62",
        // Maybe a specific version number, or `latest` if in preview mode
        version: "latest"
      }
    ]
  }
}

PlasmicComponentLoader.maybeFetchComponentData()

Same as fetchComponentData(), except if you specify a component name that Plasmic doesn’t know about, null is returned. This is useful in catch-all pages, where you’re not sure if an arbitrary path string corresponds to a Plasmic page or not.

PlasmicComponentLoader.fetchPages()

This fetches all pages that you have defined across your initialized set of projects. This is useful when you want to retrieve a list of pages you want to statically pre-generate HTML for.

Odds and ends

Normally, you’ll see informational logs on each fresh fetch, like:

Plasmic: doing a fresh fetch...
Plasmic: fetched designs for ...
Plasmic: doing a fresh fetch...
Plasmic: fetched designs for ...

You can specify PLASMIC_QUIET=1 as an environment variable to suppress this output.

<PlasmicRootProvider />

This component should sit near the root of your application. It provides information to the <PlasmicComponent /> components you have throughout your app.

It takes these props:

<PlasmicComponent />

This component renders a specific component designed in Plasmic. If the data is available (either already fetched or is provided as prefetchedData for <PlasmicRootProvider/>), then it is rendered immediately; otherwise, it renders null while it fetches data.

Customizing your component with componentProps

When you render a component using <PlasmicComponent />, you can use the componentProps prop to control which variants to activate, which slots to fill with what content, and which elements to instrument with real data or event handlers.

There are four classes of props that you can pass to componentProps, described in the next sections.

Variant props

Component variants are either simple standalone “toggle” variants, or they are organized into groups. For example, in a Button component, we may have a variant group role that includes primary and secondary variants, or a size group that includes small and large variants. Often the groups are single-choice — you only allow one variant per group to be active. But sometimes it makes sense for them to be multi-choice — for example, a Button component may have a variant group withIcons that has options prefix and suffix, both of which can be true at the same time.

Each toggle variant and each variant group is a prop.

• For toggle variants, you can pass in true if you want it activated.
• For single-choice variant groups, you can pass in the name of the variant you want to activate, or undefined if none should be activated.
• For multi-choice variant groups, you can pass in an array of variant names, or a object of variant names mapping to true or false.

Example:

// Passing in booleans to turn on `isLoading` variant.
<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    isLoading: true
  }}
/>

// Passing in literals to turn on `role` and `withIcons` variants
<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    role: "primary",
    withIcons: ["prefix", "suffix"]
  }}
/>

// Turning on variants conditionally
<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    role: (
      isPrimary() ? 'primary' :
      isSecondary() ? 'secondary' :
      undefined
    ),
    withIcons:{
      prefix: hasPrefixIcon(),
      suffix: hasSuffixIcon()
    }
  }}
/>

The variants prop

You can also combine all the variants you want to activate into a single variants key:

<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    variants: {
      role: isPrimary() ? 'primary' : isSecondary() ? 'secondary' : undefined,
      withIcons: {
        prefix: hasPrefixIcon(),
        suffix: hasSuffixIcon()
      }
    }
  }}
/>

Slot Props

You can also specify content for slots defined for the component. For example, a Button component might have slots that correspond to the button text (children):

<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    children: 'Hello!'
  }}
/>

You can also combine all the slot content you want to use into a single args key:

<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    args: {
      children: 'Hello!'
    }
  }}
/>

Note that you can only pass in strings and numbers for now as slot content.

Override props

The component as designed in Plasmic creates a tree of elements that corresponds to the tree of layers you see in Plasmic. The override props allow you to customize this tree of elements exactly as you see fit to make your component come alive. You can modify the props used for each element, attach event handlers, override rendered content, wrap elements in other React components, and more. We want you to have total control in making the element tree exactly what you want.

You reference the element you want to override by its name; so if you want to override an element, you must first name that element in Plasmic.

For example, for the Button component, you might want to override its root element to attach click handlers:

<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    root: {
      props: {
        onClick: () => alert('I got clicked!')
      }
    }
  }}
/>

Or maybe you want to render the Button as a link instead:

<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  componentProps={{
    root: {
      as: 'a',
      props: {
        href: 'https://plasmic.app'
      }
    }
  }}
/>

The object you pass into the named node (“root”) above is the “Override object”. The Override object supports the following properties; you can mix and match them as needed:

props

Object of props to use for that element. Note that the element may be a normal HTML tag — in which case you can pass in HTML attributes — or a component — in which case you can pass in component props. For example,

{
  props: {
    title: user.name,
    onClick: () => ...,
    // etc.
  }
}

as

{
  as: "a",
  props: {
    href: ...
  }
}

Root override props

Any additional props you pass into componentProps are interpreted as an override for the root element. For example, instead of using the root prop as we did before, we can directly set the overrides like this:

<PlasmicComponent
  component="Button"
  // This is interpreted as a prop override for the `root` element
  componentProps={{ onClick: () => alert('I got clicked!') }}
/>

Exploring the componentProps you can use

You can explore exactly what componentProps you can use for each component in Plasmic’s API explorer. You can get there by going to your project in Plasmic, clicking on the “Code” button in the upper-right, and selecting “Loader” as the integration scheme.

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