Creating and Opening a Modal in Phoenix 1.7

Phoenix 1.7, released this year, comes packed with exciting features such as verified routes and built-in Tailwind components. While these components provide a great starting point, they may not always fit specific design needs. In this article, we will learn how to create and open a modal in a Phoenix app.

Setting up the UI To demonstrate the process, we will create a UI for a pet shop called Petacular. To begin, we need to bootstrap the app. If you don't have the latest Phoenix installer, install it with the following command:

mix archive.install hex phx_new

Then, create the project with:

mix phx.new petacular

This will generate the core components we will use in our examples.

Creating a Modal To create a modal, we will use the phx-modal component provided by Phoenix. This component is not included in the default installation, so we need to add it to our project by including the phoenix_html dependency in our mix.exs file:

defp deps do
  [
    {:phoenix_html, "~> 3.0"},
    # other dependencies
  ]
end

After adding the dependency, we need to install it by running mix deps.get.

Next, we need to add the phx-modal component to our page. We can do this by adding the following code to our template file:

<%= render_modal @my_modal %>

Here, @my_modal is a variable that we will use to control the modal.

To open the modal, we need to add a button or link that triggers the phx-modal component. We can do this by adding the following code to our template file:

<button phx-click="phx-modal-show" phx-target="my_modal">Open Modal</button>

Here, phx-click and phx-target are attributes that tell Phoenix to show the my_modal modal when the button is clicked.

Finally, we need to define the my_modal variable in our template file. We can do this by adding the following code:

<%= modal "my_modal", fn(modal) -> %>
  <div class="modal-header">
    <h4 class="modal-title">Modal Title</h4>
    <button type="button" class="close" phx-click="phx-modal-hide" aria-label="Close">
      <span aria-hidden="true">&times;</span>
    </button>
  </div>
  <div class="modal-body">
    Modal Content
  </div>
<% end %>

Here, modal is a helper function provided by Phoenix that generates the modal HTML.

Conclusion Creating and opening a modal in Phoenix 1.7 is a straightforward process that can be achieved using the phx-modal component. By following the steps outlined in this article, developers can add modals to their Phoenix apps and improve the user experience.