Creating a Dynamic Tab Menu in Vue 3 with Slots

Learn how to build a dynamic tab menu using Vue 3 slots and components, ensuring your tabs update seamlessly with asynchronous data.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/71968544/ asked by the user 'Lowtrux' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/2396605/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/71969050/ provided by the user 'Lk77' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/8126784/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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Building a Dynamic Tab Menu with Vue 3 and Slots

In the world of web development, the ability to create reusable and dynamic components can significantly enhance user experience and efficiency. One common challenge faced by Vue.js developers is creating a dynamic tab menu using slots. This guide will guide you through the process of implementing such a menu in Vue 3, highlighting important considerations along the way.

The Problem

You might find yourself in a situation where you have multiple chat sessions, and you want to display each of them as a separate tab in a tab menu. The tricky part? The incoming chat sessions are fetched asynchronously, which can lead to issues if not handled correctly.

Here's a scenario: you have a BaseTabsWrapper component containing multiple BaseTab components, each representing a chat session. When rendering these tabs, your goal is to ensure that the titles update correctly as the data changes, particularly when the data comes from a websocket and not a traditional API call.

The Current Structure

Here's a simplified structure of your current implementation:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

In your BaseTabsWrapper, your tabs are rendered based on their titles, but the array of titles isn’t updating correctly as you fetch new data. Instead of having multiple entries, it only shows one title at initialization.

The Solution

To make your dynamic tab menu functional, we need to ensure the tab titles update whenever the underlying data changes. Using Vue's reactivity system will be vital here. Let's break down the solution into manageable sections.

Step 1: Use Computed Properties

Instead of directly assigning the tab titles in your setup function, we will leverage Vue’s computed properties. This allows you to automatically re-compute the list of titles whenever the slot content changes.

Here's how to refine the setup script in your BaseTabsWrapper:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 2: Update the BaseTab Component

No changes are required in your BaseTab component, but it’s essential that you keep the logic for displaying the slot content intact. It remains as follows:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Step 3: Handle Data Updates Correctly

With the computed property in place, your tab menu will automatically reflect any changes to the incomingChatSessions as they arrive from the websocket. This reactivity allows new tabs to automatically populate based on the latest data from your API without requiring manual re-renders.

Conclusion

By implementing computed properties in your BaseTabsWrapper component, you can easily create a dynamic tab menu that reacts to changes in asynchronous data. This solution allows for a more seamless user experience, ensuring that your application remains responsive to incoming updates.

With these strategies, building complex components in Vue.js becomes more approachable and friendly. So, go ahead and implement these techniques to enhance your Vue applications!