Block Widgets

In BlockSuite, widgets are components that can be used to display helper UI elements of a block. Sometimes, you want to display a menu to provide some extra information or actions for a block. As another example, it's a common practice to display a toolbar when you select a block.

The widget is designed to provide this kind of functionalities. Similar to blocks, widgets also depends on UI frameworks. By default, we provide a lit renderer called @blocksuite/lit for building widgets as web components. But it's still possible to use other UI frameworks. We'll introduce later about implementing custom block renderers.

Widget Component

The WidgetElement class can be used for building a widget view based on web component:

import { WidgetElement } from '@blocksuite/lit';
import { html } from 'lit';
import { customElement } from 'lit/decorators.js';

@customElements('my-widget')
class MyWidgetView extends WidgetElement<MyBlockView> {
  override render() {
    return html`
      <div>
        <h3>My Widget</h3>
      </div>
    `;
  }
}

Get Host Block

Widget is always related to a block called host block. And we can get the host block by using blockElement property.

For example, if you have a code block for displaying code examples, and you want to display a language picker widget to let users change the language of the code block. The widget could be defined in this manner:

import { WidgetElement } from '@blocksuite/lit';
import { html } from 'lit';
import { customElement } from 'lit/decorators.js';

@customElements('my-widget')
class CodeLanguagePicker extends WidgetElement<CodeBlockElement> {
  private _onChange = e => {
    this.page.updateBlock(this.blockElement.model, {
      language: e.target.value,
    });
  };

  override render() {
    return html`
      <select @change=${this._onChange}>
        <option value="javascript">JavaScript</option>
        <option value="python">Python</option>
      </select>
    `;
  }
}

You can get the std instance from this.std to use the full power of block-std.