@lightningjs/solid

solid-lightning

Solid-Lightning is a UI framework for Lightning Renderer built with SolidJS Universal Renderer. It allows you to declaratively construct lightning nodes with reactive primitives, just as you would construct a DOM tree in SolidJS. Also check out Solid Lightning Primitives for additional primitives to speed up your development.

Quick Start

Clone starter template:

> npx degit lightning-js/solid-starter-template my-app
> cd my-app
> npm i # or yarn or pnpm
> npm start # or yarn or pnpm

Usage

Most of the things you do with Solid will carry over to using Solid-Lightning with some key differences as Lightning does not use HTML / DOM / CSS / Mouse Input.

Hello World

import { render, Canvas, Text } from '@lightningjs/solid';

render(() => (
  <Canvas>
    <Text>Hello World</Text>
  </Canvas>
));

For a more detailed Hello World guide check out the Hello World guide.

Built In Components

Canvas

The element boots up the Lightning Renderer. This should be the first component passed into the render function. It takes an options param which is passed to the Lightning Renderer.

View and Text

Everything is built with two primitive components: <View> and <Text>. Think of <View> like div tag for HTML, all encompassing. Whenever you want to display text, wrap it in a <Text> tag like so <Text>Hello World</Text>

import { View, Text } from '@lightningjs/solid';
<View style={OverviewContainer}>
  <Text style={Title}>Hello World!</Text>
</View>;

Focus / activeElement

activeElement is a global Solid Signal. At any time there is one element that can be the activeElement. You can also setActiveElement at any time to any element.

import { createEffect, on } from "solid-js";
import { activeElement, setActiveElement } from "@lightningjs/solid";

// Get notified whenever the activeElement changes
createEffect(on(activeElement, (elm) => {
    focusRingRef.x = elm.x;
}, { defer: true}))

// autofocus will setActiveElement on this when intially created
<Button autofocus>TV Shows</Button>


let myButton;
onMount(() => {
  setActiveElement(myButton)
  //or
  myButton.setFocus();
})
<Button ref={myButton}>Sports</Button>

Styling / Properties

You can add styles to your JSX components using object notation or applying the properties directly to the JSX or via a ref:

import { createEffect, createSignal } from 'solid-js';

let columnRef;
const Column = {
  display: 'flex',
  flexDirection: 'column',
  justifyContent: 'flexStart',
  width: 1760,
  height: 500,
  gap: 50,
  y: 200,
  x: 80,
  color: '00000000',
};

createEffect(() => {
  columnRef.x = 200;
});

const [alpha, setAlpha] = createSignal(1);

<View ref={columnRef} alpha={alpha()} y={90} style={Column}>
  // ...add some children
</View>;

The style attribute takes an object of properties and passes them to the Lightning Renderer on initial creation of the component. The style object will not be reapplied if it is changed after creation. This keeps the style object as Read Only in the templating system allowing you to use it for multiple components. Additionally, when the style object is applied any properties on the JSX will have greater precedent so you can override styles on individual components. After the component is created, you can further change props via signals or imperatively with the ref to the component.

Prop Defaults

<View> components without a width and height value will inherit their parents width and height minus there x and y values. X and y will default to 0, 0 if not specified. <Text> component does not require any properties. If <Text> component is loaded in a flex container, it will update it's width and height when it loads.

Colors

RGBA number 0xRRGGBBAA. If you want to use hex, import { hexColor } from '@lightningjs/solid' and do hexColor('#c0ffee') to convert colors to RGBA. Please know all hex colors are #RRGGBB so they are easy to convert to 0xRRGGBBAA and usually AA is ff for full alpha. By default, every node without a src attribute will have their color set to 0x00000000 making it transparent. If you have an element which sets it's src attribute after creation, you need to update color to 0xffffffff so it's not transparent.

Border and borderRadius

border and borderRadius are special props which create effects for the DynamicShader found in the Lightning Renderer. These props can be set on the JSX or style object. The order in which you set the props determine how they are applied in the shader. Meaning you probably want to set borderRadius first. You can also set individual borders via borderLeft, borderRight, borderTop, borderBottom. These properties do not support animations.

const style = {
  borderRadius: 30,
  border: { width: 10, color: 0x000000ff }
}

// or

const style = {
  borderLeft: { width: 10, color: 0x000000ff },
  borderRight: { width: 10, color: 0x000000ff }
}

linearGradient

linearGradient is another special effect that can be used like a style with following syntax.

linearGradient:
    {
      angle: 225,
      stops: [0.1, 0.5],
      colors: [
        0xff0000ff, 0x00000000,
      ],
    },

You can have as many stops or colors as you like.

Layout

When a child element changes size updateLayout method on the node will be called. You can use onBeforeLayout and onLayout hooks to update the element with the following signature (node, { width, height}). You can use this callback to resize the parent node before flex is calculated using onBeforeLayout and after flex with onLayout. If you do, call parent.updateLayout for it to also resize.

Flex

At the moment there is a very barebone flex implementation (display: flex). It only supports flexDirection, justifyContent, alignItems and gap at the moment. But very useful for laying out rows and columns.

import { View, Text } from '@lightningjs/solid';
import { Column, Row } from '@lightningjs/solid-primitives';
const RowStyles = {
  display: 'flex',
  justifyContent: 'flexStart',
  width: 1760,
  height: 300,
  gap: 26,
  y: 400,
};
<Row gap={12} style={RowStyles}>
  <Button autofocus>TV Shows</Button>
  <Button>Movies</Button>
  <Button>Sports</Button>
  <Button>News</Button>
</Row>;

Additionally, flex will automatically layout Text nodes. Anytime a View with display: flex has children which are text nodes it adds a listener for the text to load to set the width and height of the text elements and then calls updateLayout on the container to recalculate the flex layout.

<View gap={10} style={OverviewContainer}>
  <Text style={Title}>{data().title || data().name}</Text>
  <Text style={Overview}>{data().overview}</Text>
  <View gap={8} style={SupportContainer}>
    <Text style={Subline}>Support Text</Text>
    <Text style={Subline}>{data().release_date}</Text>
    <View width={30} height={30} src={'/assets/rt-popcorn.png'} />
    <Text style={Subline}>90%</Text>
  </View>
</View>

alignItems supports flexStart, flexEnd, and center but requires it's container to have a height / width set.

Transitions / Animations

You can define which properties will animate via the transition property along with setting custom animationSettings. If you wish to reuse or use the default animationSettings, you can set the property value to true.

createEffect(on(activeElement, (elm) => {
    focusRingRef.x = elm.x;
}, { defer: true}))

<FocusRing animationSettings={{duration: 1500}} ref={focusRingRef} transition={{ x: true, scale: { duration: 1500, easing: 'ease-in-out'} }} />

For more complicated animations, you can access the Lightning renderer animate API directly:

let button;

onMount(() => {
  button.animate({ alpha: 1 }, { duration: 500 });
});
<Button ref={button}>Movies</Button>;

To find out more about animations check out the renderer example.

Global Animation Settings

You can set default animation settings for all transitions globally via Config.

import { Config } from '@lightningjs/solid';
Config.animationSettings = {
  duration: 250,
  delay: 0,
  repeat: 0,
  loop: false,
  stopMethod: false,
  easing: 'ease-in-out',
};

Also you can disable all animations with Config.animationsEnabled = false

States

The style object can also be used to style components based on their state. You can add any keys with states you'd like applied like so:

const Button = {
  width: 386,
  height: 136,
  color: 0x546160ff,
  alpha: 0.5,
  scale: 1,
  focus: {
    color: 0x58807dff,
    scale: [1.1, { duration: 500 }],
    alpha: 1,
  },
  disabled: {
    color: 0x333333ff,
  },
};

When Button is focused the focus styles will be applied. And when focus is removed, the original styles on the element will be set, meaning you need defaults on the original style to fallback to.

To apply a state to a component:

<Button states={{ active: true, happy: false, disabled: false }}>Movies</Button>
<Button states={'active'}>Sports</Button>
<Button states='happy'>News</Button>

Or imperatively

let myButton;

createEffect(() => {
  myButton.states.add('focus');

  // Check for a state
  if(myButton.states.has('focus')) {
    myButton.states.remove('focus')
  }

  myButton.states.add('disabled');
  // is and has are identical
  myButton.states.is('disabled');

  // toggle disabled on / off
  myButton.states.toggle('disabled');
})
<View ref={myButton} style={Button} />

The focus state is added and removed by the useFocusManager primitive. Also note if elements are animating and another state is applied during the animation which uses the animated value (say alpha or color) - when that state is removed it will return to some value during the animation. Be careful not to set state with styles that are also being animated.

stateMapperHook

For further customization of styles using states, you can change the states before styles are applied globally using Config.stateMapperHook. For instance, if you wanted to change your styles based on another property like tone you could do:

Config.stateMapperHook = (node, states) => {
  const tone = node.tone || ''; // node.tone is 'brand'
  return states.map((state) => state + tone);
};

Then it would apply focusbrand from the styles object.

forwardStates

When you want the state to also be applied to children elements, you can add forwardStates attribute to the parent element. Any states set on the parent will be add / removed from the children as well. This is useful for functional components where you need to change styles of children as well.

function Button(props) {
  const ButtonContainer = {
    width: 386,
    height: 136,
    color: 0x000000ff,
    alpha: 0.3,
    scale: 1,
    transition: {
      scale: { duration: 1500, delay: 200, easing: 'easy-in' },
      alpha: { duration: 1500, delay: 200, easing: 'easy-in' },
    },
    focus: {
      color: [0x58807dff, { duration: 2000 }],
      scale: 1.2,
      alpha: 1,
    },
  };

  const ButtonText = {
    fontSize: 32,
    lineHeight: Button.height,
    contain: 'width',
    textAlign: 'center',
    mountY: -0.35,
    color: 0xf6f6f9ff,
    height: Button.height,
    width: Button.width,
    focus: {
      color: 0xffffffff,
    },
  };

  return (
    <View {...props} forwardStates style={ButtonContainer}>
      <Text style={ButtonText}>{props.children}</Text>
    </View>
  );
}

Events

View and Text provide a set of event handlers that can be used in various stages of a node creation process.

  onCreate: (target: ElementNode)
  onLoad: (target: INode, nodeLoadedPayload: NodeLoadedPayload)
  onFail: (target: INode, nodeFailedPayload: NodeFailedPayload)
  onBeforeLayout: (child: ElementNode, dimensions: Dimensions)
  onLayout: (child: ElementNode, dimensions: Dimensions)

Shaders and Effects

The shader prop allows you to specify a custom shader. Most of the common use ones have shortcuts like borderRadius, border.

const RoundedRectangle = ['RoundedRectangle', { radius: 6 }];
function Button(props) {
  return (
    <View
      {...props}
      forwardStates
      style={buttonStyles.container}
      shader={RoundedRectangle}
    >
      <View style={buttonStyles.topBar} shader={RoundedRectangle}></View>
      <Text style={buttonStyles.text}>{props.children}</Text>
    </View>
  );
}

use: (Directives) in Solid

SolidJS has built in Directives support via use: property. These only work on root elements node and text. Meaning you can't use View or Text with directives so instead do:

<node
  use:withPadding={[10, 15]}
  {...props}
  style={{
    color: '#00000099',
    borderRadius: 8,
    border: { width: 2, color: '#ffffff' },
  }}
>

PS - there is currently a bug in SolidJS that you need to have the directive before spreading props.

Config

Allows setup of defaults for the app:

import { Config } from '@lightningjs/solid';

// Log out solid rendering information
// This is removed for Prod builds for performance
Config.debug = false;

//Animations (transitions) are enabled by default
Config.animationsEnabled = true;

// Set defaults for all <Text>
Config.fontSettings.fontFamily = 'Ubuntu';
Config.fontSettings.color = 0xffffffff;
Config.fontSettings.fontSize = 100;

Config.stateMapperHook = (node, states) => {
  const tone = node.tone || '';
  states.map((state) => state + tone);
};