Cafe Search Frontend Data Flow – HadCoffee Blog

Cafe Search Frontend Data Flow

Diagram of app search feature components. Location, input form and result output sections linked in Vuex

The home screen will let you search for cafes, either by location, or by cafe name (or the combination of the two).

Today I made good progress with the frontend flow of data to support this feature. The app uses Vuex for state storage. This feature has three different Vue components accessing related data to manage the users search.

The quick location search will use the browser geolocation feature as a default, and that data will flow through to the search form via Vuex. If the user is searching for a cafe by name that content will also go through Vuex for global access.

When the search event is triggered the results component can access this state, and send the API request to the server and build out the result set.

The event listening process was a little tricky, as state properties are accessed via getters, and so the normal method of capturing events and passing to component properties won’t work. A combination of Vuex getters, computed properties and watchers lets the result component listen for the search action to do its work.

I can now work on the backend logic for the API endpoint and build out the results data.

I’m a little concerned that that work could get heavy as this is almost a mini-SPA now. Possibly Livewire would have been a good solution, but I’m not going to introduce new architecture at this point in the project development.

I may have to consider how to cache the search result if the user navigates away and comes back. I’d prefer to avoid having to refetch from the server as that delay is annoying when it’s data you have already accessed. Worst case scenario I guess is to capture search criteria in localStorage, and cache the result server side so the response comes in <100ms.