Providers

The need for Providers

Previously, we discussed how Apps work in Frint. We were only assigning a name, and then registering Apps. Simple.

But how do we put more things inside our Apps? Like:

  • A store for state management
  • A Component for rendering
  • A service for communicating to our API servers
  • A special string, or configuration object, etc...

We define them as providers.

The API docs for providers can be found in frint package. which explains the usage in great details.

Assigning providers

We can do that when defining our App:

import { createApp } from 'frint';

const App = createApp({
  name: 'MyApp',
  providers: [
    // known values
    { name: 'key', useValue: 'value' },

    // values derived from a function
    { name: 'foo', useFactory: () => 'foo value' },

    // or even a class, that will be instantiated for you as its computed value
    { name: 'bar', useClass: Bar }
  ]
});

Now that you have your providers defined, you can access them by doing simply:

const app = new App();

app.get('key'); // `value`
app.get('foo'); // `foo value`

And assuming you had a Bar class like this:

class Bar {
  getValue() {
    return 'bar value';
  }
}

That can be access from your App instance as follows:

app.get('bar').getValue(); // `bar value`

Provider dependencies

Providers can also depend on other providers.

Imagine you have a baz provider, that needs to know the value of foo:

const App = createApp({
  name: 'MyApp',
  providers: [
    {
      name: 'foo',
      useValue: 'foo value'
    },
    {
      name: 'baz',
      // the dependencies are given as an argument
      useFactory: function ({ foo }) {
        // `foo` is `foo value` here
        return 'baz value';
      },
      deps: ['foo'], // we give an array of dependency names
    }
  ]
});

Same can be done with classes via useClass too. The dependencies will then be given as the constructor argument of the class.