How to convey LWC's complex Reactive property back to markup?

Question

From SF docs:

There are some limitations on the depth of changes tracked for rerendering in reactive properties. The tracking depth depends on the type of the reactive property.

Lightning Web Components tracks changes to the internal values of these types of reactive properties:

1. Primitive values
2. Plain objects created with {…}
3. Arrays created with []

Also SF does not track for complex types like Date.

Now what I wanna do is track an Array of complex object. If a new element is added subtracted from the array re-render the UI. Classic Data - table example.

So I declared my Markup:

<template>
    <h1>Hello </h1>
    <lightning-datatable
                key-field="id"
                data={data}
                columns={columns}
                is-loading={tableLoadingState}>
            </lightning-datatable>

            <lightning-button variant="brand" label="Add row" title="Add row" onclick={addRow} class="slds-m-left_x-small"></lightning-button>
</template>

JS:

import { LightningElement, track } from 'lwc';
const columns = [
    { label: 'Label', fieldName: 'name', type:"text"},
    { label: 'Website', fieldName: 'website', type: 'text' },
    { label: 'Phone', fieldName: 'phone', type: 'text'  }
];
export default class App extends LightningElement {
    @track data = [{name:'Mylabel' , website:'google.com' ,phone :'74126478963',amount : 45  }];
    @track columns = columns;
    @track tableLoadingState = false;

    addRow(){
        console.log('add row called');
        this.data.push({name:'Mylabel2s' , website:'2google.com' ,phone :'74126478963',amount : 45 });
        console.log(JSON.stringify(this.data));
        //this.data =[];

    }


}

When I save and try running this I get the message as shown in docs.

[LWC warning]: Property "_def" of [object:vm undefined (0)] is set to a non-trackable object, which means changes into that object cannot be observed.
<lightning-primitive-header-factory>

which means I cannot track the row data for lightning-datatable, which also means when I add or remove rows I would be unsuccessful.

I could not find a solution to add row in datatable and get it updated back in the markup, I searched dev guide and recipe book. Is this a limitation? or there is a workaround?

Playground Link

Answer 1

Well, I was able to fix this by using the ES6 Spread operator, which basically splits the array into the individual element and then recreate array...

addRow(){


        this.data = [...this.data ,{name:'Mylabel2s' , website:'2google.com' ,phone :'74126478963',amount : 45 } ];

    }

Playground link

Answer 2

Going through the docs and based on a quick test it seems you can only track changes to the internal values on Arrays created with []. Seems push() does not have the same effect but assigning using [] notion is.

In summary, you will need to recreate the array and assign the values using [] notion.

I was able to get this working by utilizing it as below:

this.data = [
             this.data[0], 
             {name:'Mylabel2s' , website:'2google.com' ,phone :'74126478963',amount : 45 }
];

Answer 3

Please avoid spread operators unless you really want to concatenate two arrays purposely, spread operators are O(n), which has an non negligible effect on performance.

The push() operation should be as observable as assigning a new array if the property is @track.

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/component-library/tools/playground/V4r9CeGW/2/edit

Answer 4

If you end up here, sounds like Spring 20 may have finally addressed this issue. According to the release notes, track for primitives is actually going away, and will only be needed for this type of use case (changes to object properties or arrays) Observe an Object’s Properties or an Array’s Elements

There is still one use case for @track. When a field contains an object or an array, there’s a limit to the depth of changes that are tracked. To tell the framework to observe changes to the properties of an object or to the elements of an array, decorate the field with @track.

So the above solutions definitely work, but I would try the Spring 20 solution before you implement those...

Answer 5

I got this to work without the spread operator. You can just clone the object array by JSON stringify and parse, update the object array then put it in the variable used by the table.

let data = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(this.tableData));
/* do anything here like pushing another row */
data.push(newTableRow);
this.tableData = data;