v-if, v-show and Conditional Classes

Our collapsing sidebar works, but yikes, it looks terrible! We need to fix this! Let's hide the text and links entirely when the sidebar is in its collapsed state.

v-if directive

Look at sidebar.vue. In the template, we want to hide the <h5>, the <ul> and the <hr />: basically everything except the button.

In Vue, there are two ways to do this and both of them come in the form of directives. To make this work, I'm going to add a new <div> to wrap all the elements that we need to hide.

The first directive is v-if. We can write v-if="" and, inside, use a JavaScript expression. We'll say !collapsed. So: show this if we are not collapsed. If we go over to our browser, we don't even need to refresh because we're using hot module replacement. And... it works! Much better!

inspecting v-if and the v-show directive

The key thing here, if you inspect the HTML, is that with v-if, the elements are removed entirely. So if we click the button again, the elements come back, and if we collapse, they're gone!

The other way to hide things is by using v-show. With v-show things will look the same. The difference is that, when we click collapse, the HTML is still there. v-show just adds display: none to the element when it needs to. Sneaky!

So v-show and v-if accomplish the same thing. Which you should use just depends on the situation. v-show is usually better if you're hiding and showing a lot, like a drop-down menu. That's because v-show is super fast.

But if what you're hiding isn't shown often or is complex - like a modal - v-if might be better because Vue won't spend any time even rendering the element until you need it.

.component style

Ok! While we're here, I also want to clean things up. Let's refactor our width away from style to a proper class. But before we do that, there's one thing I wanted to do earlier that I forgot about. Notice that down here in our styles, we have a single class called sidebar... and we're applying that to the root element of our template. This is great! But sometimes, as a convention, when you have a class that is applied to the root element of a component, you'll use the generic name .component

Down in style, update the class name to match.

This won't make any difference, it's just a nice standard when you need a class on your outer element.

To remove this width style, go back down to the style block and, inside .component add a new class called &.collapsed with width: 70px.

If you're not familiar with this syntax, it means that if an element has both the component and the collapsed classes, then it will get this width.

Back in the template, delete the style attribute.

The tricky part here is that we need to conditionally add the collapsed class to our root element. But... there's not really a good way to do that.

Conditional :class

Luckily Vue is here again to rescue us! It turns out, :class has another superhero syntax.

Instead of an array, pass an object where every key in the object will be the class name that you want to add, and the value will be true or false for whether or not you want this class. Since we always want these three classes, we'll say $style.component: true, 'p-3': true and 'mb-5': true.

And... Webpack is furious with me! The reason is that, in an object, you can't use variable names as keys. The problem is that JavaScript thinks that all keys are strings, even if you don't have quotes around them. If you want tell JavaScript that your key is some sort of variable, you need to put square brackets around it. That's a bit ugly, but now JavaScript understands it.

To add the collapsed class conditionally. I'll use that funny syntax again to say $style.collapsed, because every time we reference a class within modular CSS, we need to use $style.. And since we want the collapsed class to show if the collapsed state is true, we'll just set it to collapsed.

Back in the browser, click on >> Collapse and... perfect! You can see our class hiding and showing in the DOM.

But... there's a slightly better way to accomplish all of this... and it will use one of my favorite features of Vue: computed properties. Let's talk about them next.