Wim Leers: XB week 14: early christmas tree

How does cta1href sound to you? Gibberish, right? 😀
Jesse “jessebaker” Baker pointed out that Experience Builder (XB) in its current state was subjecting its users to such nonsense! Fortunately, thanks to every Single Directory Component (SDC) specifying a title for each prop, we were able to automatically generate the much more readable CTA 1 link — thanks to foundations Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins did in #3461422 from 3 weeks prior.

Utkarsh “utkarsh_33” and Omkar “omkar-pd” Deshpande eliminated an extraneous “preview” request from the client, hence improving performance (as well as sanity).

Ben & Jesse made XB’s Cypress end-to-end tests leap massively ahead (especially compared to Drupal core’s use of Nightwatch), by introducing cypress-terminal-report. The resulting test failure output on GitLab CI makes it far easier to figure out where something is going wrong: a big productivity boost!

Two weeks ago I alluded to it, and now it finally happened: after months of getting basic infrastructure off the ground, we now finally were able to Kyle “ctrladel” Einecker’s set of representative SDCs that Lauri approved, Ivan “finnsky” Berdinsky and I reviewed, and Ted “tedbow” Bowman pushed across the finish line.
(Not everything Kyle proposed landed, because XB and the SDC subsystem do not yet have all the capabilities needed for some of the SDCs he wrote — see the follow-up if you’re interested.)

Some of the people working full-time on XB are doing so using DDEV. And running end-to-end tests that use WebDriver with both the test runner and the system under test living in a Docker container turns out to be quite challenging! Besides us, we know that many (most?) in the community use a DDEV-based development environment, and we’d love to welcome as many contributors as possible. Not being able to run the most important tests of all then is of course quite a problem.
That’s why Travis “traviscarden” Carden had been diligently (he actually joined a few weeks ago!) working on making that painless. The result: the ddev-drupal-xb-dev DDEV add-on — once installed, running (and seeing!) the XB end-to-end tests requires only ddev xb-cypress-open 🙂

Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis is back full-time on XB, and he’s started working on the super important #3463999: Auto-create/update Component config entities for all discovered SDCs that meet XB’s minimum criteria. It’s a critical piece in making Lauri’s product vision come to life: it will ensure that any SDC that we’re confident will work in XB becomes available automatically.¹ While working on that, he discovered that there was a pretty big oversight in the StorablePropShape work I landed two weeks ago: in some places Drupal core does not distinguish between “instance settings” and “storage settings” at all (and nor did the code I landed then), but in some places it actually does. Felix was running into that now, thanks to config validation, and so he fixed that.

Many of the things that happened this week were on the “enablement” side of things. Nonetheless, the XB UI also made progress:

1. Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang and Jesse landed the updated “insert” UX and hierarchy view, based on the updated design.
2. But, most importantly, nicely rounding out this post by combining “enablement” and improved UX: Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri implemented error boundaries. In principle, you should never see these, but we all occasionally have internet connection issues. At those times, Bálint’s “Try again” addition works beautifully 🙂
   (And as a bonus it accelerates debugging failing server responses!)

Thanks to Travis for reviewing this!

Week 14 was August 12–18, 2024.

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

• The very first component tree rendered in Experience Builder: both slots of this ‘two column’ SDC contain other SDCs!
• Error boundaries with a friendly ‘Try again’.