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Overview

🚧 Under construction

This section is under construction and may change.

Param Types

The DECSYS Parameter Types utilities package, used for authoring DECSYS Response Components.

Installation

npm install @decsys/param-types

Use in DECSYS Components

Component Authors should use param-types when writing components to provide their components with a params metadata property which provides a spec for parameters which should be configurable within the DECSYS Survey Platform.

It is possible to configure the params property without assistance from param-types but it's not recommended.

param-types provides helper functions and type constants to make specifying params easy.

  1. Use the type builders string, stringUndefined, number, bool and oneOf to specify individual parameters easily

Example​


import ParamTypes from "@decsys/param-types";

/**
 * A component which has two configurable parameters,
 * and also props for loading previous results
 */
const MyComponent = ({ param1, param2, results }) => {
    //...
}

// Configure Component params using the type builders,
// so the Platform Editor knows how to configure your component
MyComponent.params = {
    param1: paramTypes.string("Friendly Label", "Default Value"),
    param2: paramTypes.oneOf(
        "Friendly Label",
        ["valid", "values", "not", "default"],
        "default")
}

Imports​

You can import from param-types in a variety of ways.

It's only a small package but it should support tree shaking if you use named imports from specific modules.

// named imports from specific modules
import { string as stringParam, oneOf } from "@decsys/param-types/builders";

// default imports from specific modules
// TODO: better example now `buildPropTypes` is gone
import buildPropTypes from "@decsys/param-types/buildPropTypes";

// default or named imports from the package
import paramTypes from "@decsys/param-types";

ES Modules only?​

param-types is only provided as untranspiled ES Modules.

It only depends on prop-types but that should be fulfilled as a peer dependency by the package using it (ultimately the Survey Platform).

DECSYS Components are expected to be written and exported as ES Modules (though bundled with their dependencies).

Due to the scope of use of param-types, other module formats, or direct browser use support do not seem necessary.

Use in the DECSYS Survey Platform

The DECSYS Survey Platform contains some built-in components which all use param-types to specify their params.

The Platform's Component Editor uses the param-types type constants to avoid magic strings, and it uses the params specs of loaded components in order to provide a good parameter configuration experience in the UI.