ReactiveBase is a container component that wraps all the ReactiveSearch components together. It binds the backend app (data source) with the UI view components (elements wrapped within ReactiveBase), allowing a UI component to be reactively updated every time there is a change in the data source or in other UI components.

This is the first component you will need to add when using ReactiveSearch.

Usage

Copy
<template>
	<reactive-base app="appname" credentials="abcdef123:abcdef12-ab12-ab12-ab12-abcdef123456">
		<component1 .. />
		<component2 .. />
	</reactive-base>
</template>

Props

  • app String app name as it appears on the dashboard. Refers to an index if you're using your own Elasticsearch cluster. (Multiple indexes can be connected to by specifiying comma separated index names)
  • type String [optional] types on which the queries should run on. Multiple types can be passed as comma separated values. The default behavior here is to search on all the app types.
  • credentials String [optional] app credentials as they appear on the dashboard. It should be a string of the format "username:password" and is used for authenticating the app. If you are not using an appbase.io app, credentials may not be necessary - although having an open-access Elasticsearch cluster is not recommended.
  • url String [optional] URL where Elasticsearch cluster is hosted, only needed if your app uses a non appbase.io URL.
  • enableAppbase boolean [optional] Defaults to false. You can set this to true when you're using appbase.io alongside Elasticsearch. It enables the following features:
    • Recording of analytics events - search and clicks. Read more.
    • Query generation happens on server side - protecting against security concerns around query injection.
    • Apply query rules and functions for search queries. Read more.
    • Apply additional security controls to requests: authenticate via RBAC (via JWTs) or Basic Auth, ACL based access control, IP based rate limits, IP/HTTP Referers whitelisting, fields filtering. Read more.
  • headers Object [optional] set custom headers to be sent with each server request as key/value pairs. For example:
Copy
<template>
	<reactive-base
		app="appname"
		credentials="abcdef123:abcdef12-ab12-ab12-ab12-abcdef123456"
		:headers="{ secret: 'reactivesearch-is-awesome' }"
	>
		<component1 .. />
		<component2 .. />
	</reactive-base>
</template>
  • appbaseConfig Object [optional] allows you to customize the analytics experience when appbase.io is used as a backend. Read more about it over here.
  • analytics Boolean [optional] allows recording search analytics (and click analytics) when set to true and appbase.io is used as a backend. Defaults to false.
    Check the analytics recipe for click analytics implementation.

    Note: This prop has been marked as deprecated. Please use the recordAnalytics property in the appbaseConfig prop instead.

  • analyticsConfig Object [optional] allows you to customize the analytics experience when appbase.io is used as a backend. Read more about it over here.

    Note: This prop has been marked as deprecated. Please use the appbaseConfig prop instead.

  • initialQueriesSyncTime Number [optional] allows you to define a wait time in milliseconds. We wait for initialQueriesSyncTime time to combine the individual component queries to a single network request at initial load. This prop is helpful to optimize the performance when you have a lot of filters on the search page, using a wait time of 100-200 milliseconds would merge the multiple requests into a single request.
  • as String [optional] allows to use a custom html element tag, defaults to div.
  • getSearchParams Function [optional] Enables you to customize the evaluation of query-params-string from the url (or) any other source. If this function is not set, the library will use window.location.search as the search query-params-string for parsing selected-values. This can come handy if the URL is using hash values.
  • setSearchParams Function [optional] Enables you to customize setting of the query params string in the url by providing the updated query-params-string as the function parameter. If this function is not set, the library will set the window.history via pushState method.
  • theme Object [optional] allows over-writing of default styles by providing the respective key/values. You can read more about its usage here
  • transformRequest Function [optional] Enables transformation of network request before execution. This function will give you the request object as the param and expect an updated request in return, for execution. Note that this is an experimental API and will likely change in the future.

    Note:

    From v3.0.1 it is possible to define transformRequest as an async method which will return a promise which resolves the modified request options.

If you need to include credentials (credentials are cookies, authorization headers or TLS client certificates), you can do it this way:

Copy
<template>
	<reactive-base
		app="appname"
		:transformRequest="(props)=> ({
            ...props,
            credentials: 'include',
        })"
	>
		<component1 .. />
		<component2 .. />
	</reactive-base>
</template>

You can also modify the request URL in that way:

Copy
<template>
	<reactive-base
		app="appname"
		:transformRequest="(props)=> ({
            ...props,
            url: props.url.replace('_msearch', '_search'),
        })"
	>
		<component1 .. />
		<component2 .. />
	</reactive-base>
</template>

The above example will change the default _msearch request to _search request.

  • tranformResponse Function [optional] Enables transformation of search network response before rendering them. This asynchronous function will give you elasticsearch response object and componentId as params and expects an updated response in return in the similar structure of elasticsearch. You can use componentId to conditionally transform response for a particular reactivesearch component only.
Copy
<template>
	<reactive-base
		app="appname"
		credentials="abcdef123:abcdef12-ab12-ab12-ab12-abcdef123456"
		:headers="{ secret: 'reactivesearch-is-awesome' }"
		:transformResponse="transformResponse"
	>
		<component1 .. />
		<component2 .. />
	</reactive-base>
</template>
<script>
	...,
	methods: {
	    getExtraInformation(ids) {
	        ...
	    },
	    async transformResponse(elasticsearchResponse, _componentId) {
	            const ids = elasticsearchResponse.responses[0].hits.hits.map(
	                item => item._id
	            );
	            const extraInformation = await this.getExtraInformation(ids);
	            const hits = elasticsearchResponse.responses[0].hits.hits.map(
	                (item) => {
	                    const extraInformationItem = extraInformation.find(
	                        otherItem => otherItem._id === item._id
	                    );
	                    return {
	                        ...item,
	                        ...extraInformationItem
	                    };
	                }
	            );
	            return {
	                response: [
	                    {
	                        ...elasticsearchResponse.responses[0],
	                        hits: {
	                            ...elasticsearchResponse.responses[0].hits,
	                            hits
	                        }
	                    }
	                ]
	            };
	        }
	}
</script>

Note

transformResponse function is expected to return data in following structure.

Copy
{
    response: [
        {
            hits: {
                hits: [...],
                total: 100
            },
            took: 1
        }
    ]
}

Connect to Elasticsearch

Note

An app within ReactiveSearch's context refers to an index in Elasticsearch.

ReactiveSearch works out of the box with an Elasticsearch index hosted anywhere. You can use the url prop of the ReactiveBase component to connect the child ReactiveSearch components to your own index. For example,

Copy
<template>
	<reactive-base app="appname" url="http://your-elasticsearch-cluster">
		<component1 .. />
		<component2 .. />
	</reactive-base>
</template>

It's also possible to secure your Elasticsearch cluster's access with a middleware proxy server that is connected to ReactiveSearch. This allows you to set up custom authorization rules, prevent misuse, only pass back non-sensitive data, etc. Here's an example app where we show this using a Node.JS / Express middleware:

Note

If you are using the url prop for an Elasticsearch cluster, ensure that your ReactiveSearch app can access the cluster. Typically, you will need to configure CORS in elasticsearch.yml to enable access.

Copy
http.cors.enabled: true
http.cors.allow-credentials: true
http.cors.allow-origin: 'http://reactive-search-app-domain.com:port'
http.cors.allow-headers: X-Requested-With, X-Auth-Token, Content-Type, Content-Length, Authorization, Access-Control-Allow-Headers, Accept

Note

If you are using Elasticsearch on AWS, then the recommended approach is to connect via the middleware proxy as they don't allow setting the Elasticsearch configurations.

Next Steps

Once you have added the ReactiveBase component, you can get started with adding other components as its children.

  • List specific components can be found here.
  • Range specific components can be found here.
  • Search specific components can be found here.
  • Result specific components can be found here.

You can read more about when to use which components in the overview guide here.