JavaScript code in CKAN is broken down into modules: small, independent units of JavaScript code. CKAN themes can add JavaScript features by providing their own modules. This tutorial will explain the main concepts involved in CKAN JavaScript modules and walk you through the process of adding custom modules to themes.
This tutorial assumes a basic understanding of CKAN plugins and templating, see:
/extensions/index/theming/templates
This tutorial assumes a basic understanding of and , see:
/contributing/string-i18nHow to mark strings for translation in your JavaScript code.
The idea behind CKAN's JavaScript modules is to keep the code simple and easy to test, debug and maintain, by breaking it down into small, independent modules. JavaScript modules in CKAN don't share global variables, and don't call each other's code.
These JavaScript modules are attached to HTML elements in the page, and enhance the functionality of those elements. The idea is that an HTML element with a JavaScript module attached should still be fully functional even if JavaScript is completely disabled (e.g. because the user's web browser doesn't support JavaScript). The user experience may not be quite as nice without , but the functionality should still be there. This is a programming technique known as graceful degradation, and is a basic tenet of web accessibility.
In the sections below, we'll walk you through the steps to add a new JavaScript feature to CKAN - dataset info popovers. We'll add an info button to each dataset on the datasets page which, when clicked, opens a popover containing some extra information and user actions related to the dataset:
To get CKAN to call some custom JavaScript code, we need to:
Implement a module, and register it with CKAN. Create the file
ckanext-example_theme/ckanext/example_theme/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js, with these contents:/../ckanext/example_theme/v16_initialize_a_javascript_module/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
This bit of calls the
ckan.module()function to register a new JavaScript module with CKAN.ckan.module()takes two arguments: the name of the module being registered ('example_theme_popover'in this example) and a function that returns the module itself. The function takes two arguments, which we'll look at later. The module is just a object with a single attribute,initialize, whose value is a function that CKAN will call to initialize the module. In this example, the initialize function just prints out a confirmation message - this module doesn't do anything interesting yet.Note
module names should begin with the name of the extension, to avoid conflicting with other modules. See
javascript module names best practice.Note
Each module's
initialize()function is called on DOM ready.Include the module in a page, using Fanstatic, and apply it to one or more HTML elements on that page. We'll override CKAN's
package_item.htmltemplate snippet to insert our module whenever a package is rendered as part of a list of packages (for example, on the dataset search page). Create the fileckanext-example_theme/ckanext/example_theme/templates/snippets/package_item.htmlwith these contents:/../ckanext/example_theme/v16_initialize_a_javascript_module/templates/snippets/package_item.html
Using data-* attributes on the Mozilla Developer Network.
If you now restart the development server and open http://127.0.0.1:5000/dataset in your web browser, you should see an extra info button next to each dataset shown. If you open a console in your browser, you should see the message that your module has printed out.
Most web browsers come with built-in developer tools including a console that lets you see text printed by code to
console.log(), a debugger, and more. For example:If you have more than one dataset on your page, you'll see the module's message printed once for each dataset. The
package_item.htmltemplate snippet is rendered once for each dataset that's shown in the list, so your<button>element with thedata-module="example_theme_popover"attribute is rendered once for each dataset, and CKAN creates a new instance of your module for each of these<button>elements. If you view the source of your page, however, you'll see thatexample_theme_popover.jsis only included with a<script>tag once. Fanstatic is smart enough to deduplicate resources.Note
modules must be included as Fanstatic resources, you can't add them to a
publicdirectory and include them using your own<script>tags.
Now let's start to make our module do something useful: show a Bootstrap popover with some extra info about the dataset when the user clicks on the info button.
First, we need our Jinja template to pass some of the dataset's fields to our module as options. Change package_item.html to look like this:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v17_popover/templates/snippets/package_item.html
This adds some data-module-* attributes to our <button> element, e.g. data-module-title="{{ package.title }}" ({{ package.title }} is a Jinja2 expression <expressions and variables> that evaluates to the title of the dataset, CKAN passes the Jinja2 variable package to our template).
Warning
Although HTML 5 treats any attribute named data-* as a data attribute, only attributes named data-module-* will be passed as options to a CKAN module. So we have to named our parameters data-module-title etc., not just data-title.
Now let's make use of these options in our module. Change example_theme_popover.js to look like this:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v17_popover/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
Note
It's best practice to add a docstring to the top of a module, as in the example above, briefly documenting what the module does and what options it takes. See javascript module docstrings best practice.
Any data-module-* attributes on the HTML element are passed into the module in the object this.options:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v17_popover/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
A module can access the HTML element that it was applied to through the this.el variable. To add a popover to our info button, we call Bootstap's popover() function on the element, passing in an options object with some of the options that Bootstrap's popovers accept:
// Add a Bootstrap popover to the HTML element (this.el) that this
// JavaScript module was initialized on.
this.el.popover({title: this.options.title,
content: content,
placement: 'left'});For other objects and functions available to modules, see javascript-module-objects-and-methods.
Default values for module options can be provided by adding an options object to the module. If the HTML element doesn't have a data-module-* attribute for an option, then the default will be used instead. For example...
Think of an example to do using default values.
So far, we've used simple string formatting to put together the contents of our popover. If we want the popover to contain much more complex HTML we really need to render a template for it, using the full power of Jinja2 templates <templates> and CKAN's template helper functions <template helper functions>. Let's edit our plugin to use a Jinja2 template to render the contents of the popups nicely.
First, edit package_item.html to make it pass a few more parameters to the JavaScript module using data-module-* attributes:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v18_snippet_api/templates/snippets/package_item.html
We've also added a second {% resource %} tag to the snippet above, to include a custom CSS file. We'll see the contents of that CSS file later.
Next, we need to add a new template snippet to our extension that will be used to render the contents of the popovers. Create this example_theme_popover.html file:
ckanext-example_theme/
ckanext/
example_theme/
templates/
ajax_snippets/
example_theme_popover.htmland put these contents in it:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v18_snippet_api/templates/ajax_snippets/example_theme_popover.html
This is a Jinja2 template that renders some nice looking contents for a popover, containing a few bits of information about a dataset. It uses a number of CKAN's Jinja2 templating features, including marking user-visible strings for translation and calling template helper functions. See templates for details about Jinja2 templating in CKAN.
Note
The new template file has to be in a templates/ajax_snippets/ directory so that we can use the template from our code using CKAN's :js~this.sandbox.client.getTemplate function. Only templates from ajax_snippets directories are available from the :js~this.sandbox.client.getTemplate function.
Next, edit fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js as shown below. There's a lot going on in this new code, including:
- Using Bootstrap's popover API to show and hide popovers, and set their contents.
- Using jQuery's event handling API to get our functions to be called when the user clicks on a button.
Using a function from CKAN's
JavaScript sandbox <javascript-sandbox>.The sandbox is a object, available to all modules as
this.sandbox, that contains a collection of useful functions and variables.:js
this.sandbox.clientis a CKAN API client written in , that should be used whenever a module needs to talk to the CKAN API, instead of modules doing their own HTTP requests.:js
this.sandbox.client.getTemplateis a function that sends an asynchronous (ajax) HTTP request (i.e. send an HTTP request from and receive the response in , without causing the browser to reload the whole page) to CKAN asking for a template snippet to be rendered.
Hopefully the liberal commenting in the code below makes it clear enough what's going on:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v18_snippet_api/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
Finally, we need some custom CSS to make the HTML from our new snippet look nice. In package_item.html above we added a {% resource %} tag to include a custom CSS file. Now we need to create that file, ckanext-example_theme/ckanext/example_theme/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.css:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v18_snippet_api/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.css
Restart CKAN, and your dataset popovers should be looking much better.
What if our JavaScript makes an Ajax request to CKAN, such as our :js~this.sandbox.client.getTemplate call above, and gets an error in response? We can simulate this by changing the name of the requested template file to one that doesn't exist:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v19_01_error/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
If you reload the datasets page after making this change, you'll see that when you click on a popover its contents remain Loading.... If you have a development console open in your browser, you'll see the error response from CKAN each time you click to open a popover.
Our JavaScript module's _onReceiveSnippet() function is only called if the request gets a successful response from CKAN. :js~this.sandbox.client.getTemplate also accepts a second callback function parameter that will be called when CKAN sends an error response. Add this parameter to the :js~this.sandbox.client.getTemplate call:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v19_02_error_handling/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
Now add the new error function to the JavaScript module:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v19_02_error_handling/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
After making these changes, you should see that if CKAN responds with an error, the contents of the popover are replaced with the error message from CKAN.
You may have noticed that, with our example code so far, if you click on the info button of one dataset on the page then click on the info button of another dataset, both dataset's popovers are shown. The first popover doesn't disappear when the second appears, and the popovers may overlap. If you click on all the info buttons on the page, popovers for all of them will be shown at once:
To make one popover disappear when another appears, we can use CKAN's :js~this.sandbox.client.publish and :js~this.sandbox.client.subscribe functions. These pair of functions allow different instances of a JavaScript module (or instances of different JavaScript modules) on the same page to talk to each other. The way it works is:
- Modules can subscribe to events by calling :js
this.sandbox.client.subscribe, passing the 'topic' (a string that identifies the type of event to subscribe to) and a callback function. - Modules can call :js
this.sandbox.client.publishto publish an event for all subscribed modules to receive, passing the topic string and one or more further parameters that will be passed on as parameters to the receiver functions. - When a module calls :js
~this.sandbox.client.publish, any callback functions registered by previous calls to :js~this.sandbox.client.subscribewith the same topic string will be called, and passed the parameters that were passed to publish. If a module no longer wants to receive events for a topic, it calls :js
~this.sandbox.client.unsubscribe.All modules that subscribe to events should have a
teardown()function that unsubscribes from the event, to prevent memory leaks. CKAN calls theteardown()functions of modules when those modules are removed from the page. Seepubsub unsubscribe best practice.
Warning
Don't tightly couple your JavaScript modules by overusing pubsub. See pubsub overuse best practice.
Remember that because we attach our example_theme_popover.js module to a <button> element that is rendered once for each dataset on the page, CKAN creates one instance of our module for each dataset. The only way these objects can communicate with each other so that one object can hide its popover when another object shows its popover, is by using pubsub.
Here's a modified version of our example_theme_popover.js file that uses pubsub to make the dataset popovers disappear whenever a new popover appears:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v20_pubsub/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
CKAN provides a number of custom jQuery plugins for JavaScript modules to use by default, see jquery-plugins. Extensions can also add their own jQuery plugins, and the plugins will then be available to all JavaScript code via the :jsthis.$ object.
- How to Create a Basic Plugin
jQuery's own documentation on writing jQuery plugins. Read this for all the details on writing jQuery plugins, here we'll only provide a simple example and show you how to integrate it with CKAN.
It's a good idea to implement any JavaScript functionality not directly related to CKAN as a jQuery plugin. That way your CKAN JavaScript modules will be smaller as they'll contain only the CKAN-specific code, and your jQuery plugins will also be reusable on non-CKAN sites. CKAN core uses jQuery plugins to implement features including date formatting, warning users about unsaved changes when leaving a page containing a form without submitting the form, restricting the set of characters that can be typed into an input field, etc.
Let's add a jQuery plugin to our CKAN extension that makes our info buttons turn green when clicked.
Replace this with a more realistic example.
First we need to write the jQuery plugin itself. Create the file ckanext-example_theme/ckanext/example_theme/fanstatic/jquery.greenify.js with the following contents:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v21_custom_jquery_plugin/fanstatic/jquery.greenify.js
If this JavaScript code looks a little confusing at first, it's probably because it's using the Immediately-Invoked Function Expression (IIFE) pattern. This is a common JavaScript code pattern in which an anonymous function is created and then immediately called once, in a single expression. In the example above, we create an unnamed function that takes a single parameter, jQuery, and then we call the function passing this.jQuery to its jQuery parameter. The code inside the body of the function is the important part. Writing jQuery plugins in this way ensures that any variables defined inside the plugin are private to the plugin, and don't pollute the global namespace.
In the body of our jQuery plugin, we add a new function called greenify() to the jQuery object:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v21_custom_jquery_plugin/fanstatic/jquery.greenify.js
jquery.fn is the jQuery prototype object, the object that normal jQuery objects get all their methods from. By adding a method to this object, we enable any code that has a jQuery object to call our method on any HTML element or set of elements. For example, to turn all <a> elements on the page green you could do: jQuery('a').greenify().
The code inside the greenify() function just calls jQuery's standard css() method to set the CSS color attribute of the element to green. This is just standard jQuery code, except that within a custom jQuery function you use this to refer to the jQuery object, instead of using $ or jquery (as you would normally do when calling jQuery methods from code external to jQuery).
Our method then returns this to allow jQuery method chaining to be used with our method. For example, a user can set an element's CSS color attribute to green and add the CSS class greenified to the element in a single expression by chaining our jQuery method with another method: $('a').greenify().addClass('greenified');
Before we can use our greenify() method in CKAN, we need to import the jquery.greenify.js file into the CKAN page. To do this, add a {% resource %} tag to a template file, just as you would do to include any other JavaScript or CSS file in CKAN. Edit the package_item.html file:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v21_custom_jquery_plugin/templates/snippets/package_item.html
Now we can call the greenify() method from our example_theme_popover JavaScript module. For example, we could add a line to the _onClick() method in example_theme_popover.js so that when a dataset info button is clicked it turns green:
/../ckanext/example_theme/v21_custom_jquery_plugin/fanstatic/example_theme_popover.js
Show how to Internationalize a JavaScript module.
Show how to write tests for the example module.