Web Components in Vanilla JS: Equivalent of ngFor and v-for?

Question

I have a custom component defined in vanilla JS:

class Article extends HTMLElement {
  constructor() {
    super();
  }

  connectedCallback() {
    this.render();
  }

  render() {
    this.innerHTML = /*html*/ `
    <div>this.getAttribute("title")</div>
    `;
  }
}

customElements.define("custom-article", Article);

I then would like to instantiate these components from an array, specifically (in the HTML):

This is trivial to do in both Angular and Vue.js (and probably in every other JS framework), however I can't find documentation on the same functionality being implemented in Vanilla JS.

Answer 1

Sadly, JS template literals don't come with such functionality yet - you're going to find yourself working less and less with HTML strings when working on vanilla JS webcomponents.

Here's an example of a string-based approach in vanilla JS, rendering a list of fruits:

class FruitList extends HTMLElement {
  ul = document.createElement('ul');
  fruits = ['Apple','Banana','Strawberry','Ananas','Cherry'];
  
  constructor() {
    super().attachShadow({mode: 'open'}).append(this.ul);
  }

  connectedCallback() {
    this.render();
  }

  render() {
    this.ul.innerHTML = this.fruits.reduce((s,f)=>s+=`<li>${f}</li>`,'');
  }
}

customElements.define("fruit-list", FruitList);

<fruit-list></fruit-list>

Yet for simple HTML that is to be created, dropping the use of strings altogether works just fine:

class FruitList extends HTMLElement {
  ul = document.createElement('ul');
  fruits = ['Apple','Banana','Strawberry','Ananas','Cherry'];
  
  constructor() {
    super().attachShadow({mode: 'open'}).append(this.ul);
  }

  connectedCallback() {
    this.render();
  }

  render() {
    while (this.ul.firstChild) this.ul.firstChild.remove();
    this.ul.append(...this.fruits.map(fruit => {
      const li = document.createElement('li');
      li.textContent = fruit;
      return li;
    }));
  }
}

customElements.define("fruit-list", FruitList);

<fruit-list></fruit-list>

This also has the neat advantage that you can much more easily e.g. attach event listeners to the dynamically created elements.