Inquirer GUI

Vue3 migration

The master branch now supports Vue3 and Vuetify3.

The Form component, builtin plugins and all custom plugins were migrated. The new versioning is 3.x.y.

Vue2 maintenance mode

We still keep master-maintenance branch that is based on Vue2.

Please reserve the use of this branch exclusively for critical features or bug fixes.

Since we're still in the process of fully transitioning to Vue3, any changes made here will also need to be contributed to the master branch (Vue3 based).

When making changes, make sure to increase the version number based on the nature of the change. However, DO NOT increase the major version to 3, as that version is specifically reserved for the Vue3 release channel.

Description

inquirer-gui is a UI component that displays Inquirer.js-compliant questions in an interactive HTML form.

Requirements

• node.js version 10 or higher.

Installation and Usage

There are several use-cases for the consuming inquirer-gui component:

• You can use it in another Vue application or in a non-Vue application.
• You can use it in a browser or in Visual Studio Code.
• You can provide the questions in the frontend or in the backend (providing questions in the backend implies more flexibility in composing questions)

We provide examples for some of the above use-cases.

First, clone this directory:

git clone https://github.com/SAP/inquirer-gui

Run in Browser (Frontend Questions)

Use the provided sample-app:

npm install
cd examples/sample-app
npm install
npm run serve

This will run the web server on localhost on an available port. Open the provided link in the browser.

Run in Browser - vite based application (Frontend Questions)

Use the provided sample-app-vite:

npm install
cd examples/sample-app-vite
npm install
npm run serve

This will run the web server on localhost on an available port. Open the provided link in the browser.

Run in Browser (Backend Questions)

Use the provided sample-app and websocket-server:

npm install
cd websocket-server
npm install

If using Visual Studio Code, run the WebSocket Server debug configuration. This will start the sample WebSocket server that listens for requests on port 8081.

cd examples/sample-app
npm install
npm run serve

This will run the web server on localhost on an available port. Open the provided link in the browser.

Run as VSCode Extension

Use the provided sample-vscode-extension:

cd examples/sample-vscode-extension
npm install
npm run compile
npm run copy-dist

Open the sample-vscode-extension as root folder and in the run configurations choose Launch Extension.

If you change the source code of the extension itself you must re-run npm run compile.

If changing the webview content don't forget to update the dist folder by running npm run clean-dist && npm run copy-dist.

The copy-dist script creates the dist folder containing the Vue Web application you want to load as webview in a VSCode extension panel and copy it to the extension.

Note that the vscode extension contains example code that loads the index.html, styles and scripts. In Vue3 using vite based configuration, the bundled code and structure has been changed so this code has to be adjusted accordingly.

Usage

If writing a Vue application, simply add the following line to your <template> tag:

<form ref="form" :questions="questions" @answered="onAnswered" />

The questions property is an inquirer.js-compliant array of questions. E.g.:

[
  {
    type: "input",
    name: "name",
    message: "Your name (frontend)",
    default: "Joe",
    validate: function (input) {
      if (input.length >= 2) {
        return true;
      } else {
        return "Name must be at least 2 characters long";
      }
    },
  },
];

The answered event is fired when any answer is changed:

• The first parameter to the event handler, answers, contains all answers.
• The second parameter, issues, can be used to, for example, enable or disable a Next button.

Custom form elements

inquirer-gui provides built-in form elements for all built-in inquirer.js question types:

• list, rawlist
• expand
• checkbox
• confirm
• input (number, password and input)
• editor

inquirer-gui supports custom form elements via its plugin mechanism (see more here).

Creating a custom form element

A form element plugin is a javascript object with this structure:

{
  questionType: '<inquirer-question-type>';
  component: <MyVueComponent>;
}

Where questionType is the string provided in the question's type property, and component is a Vue component that renders questions of the given type.

There is example of a custom form element in the /sample-plugin folder. It is defined as a Vue plugin and was published as @sap-devx/inquirer-gui-date-plugin on npm.

Consuming a custom form element

Consume a custom form element as a Vue plugin using the app.use() method. The plugin is returned in the method's options parameter. For example, refer to /sample-app/src/App.vue:

import DatePlugin from "@sap-devx/inquirer-gui-date-plugin";

const options = {};
// use the Vue plugin
app.use(DatePlugin, options);
// register the inquirer-gui plugin with your form instance
form.registerPlugin(options.plugin);

How to obtain support

To get more help, support and information please open a github issue.

Contributing

Contributing information can be found in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.