gods-eye-view/docs/VUE-MIGRATION.md

Vue migration

The application UI moves from static templates plus imperative DOM wiring to Vue 3 components with Pinia stores. The migration keeps the experience the same: element ids, classes, the global stylesheet, translations, keyboard shortcuts, voice actions, share links and the phone layout all behave as before. The one intended change is the panel rail described below.

Goals

• Views are Vue single-file components; state that several views read lives in Pinia stores rather than in DOM classes.
• The owners listed in UI-OWNERSHIP.md keep their responsibilities. A component replaces DOM construction; it does not add a second owner of the same state.
• Public methods used by layers, scene playback, voice and host applications (setPanelCollapsed, setContextMode, setStyle, share and location subscriptions) keep their signatures.
• Ids and classes used by browser QA and host applications stay stable until a host can use an explicit extension point instead.

The panel rail

Each desktop sidebar gets a floating icon rail that lists every panel available on that side. Selecting an icon opens that panel; selecting it again closes it. One panel is open per side at a time, so the rail replaces the accordion stacking. Panels that are not available in the current mode (for example Weather before a weather layer is active) are shown disabled or omitted as the panel's own availability rule dictates. The rail hides with the rest of the chrome in Cockpit, scene playback, recording and the clean view.

Phones keep the existing bottom tab bar and sheets; the rail is desktop only.

Voice and keyboard openings go through the same panel store, so they follow the one-panel rule too. Share links continue to record which panels are open.

Component kit

src/ui/kit/ holds the generic components (UiRail, UiPanel, UiButton, UiChip, UiTooltip and so on). Names, props and events follow Halfpixel's ui-vue kit so the two can converge later, but the components are written for this repository and styled by its existing stylesheet and custom properties. They contain no application state.

Phases

1. Foundation. Vue, Pinia and the Vite Vue plugin join the browser build (build/vite.js, so host applications receive them too). One Vue runtime is created by the shell (src/ui/vueRuntime.js) with one Pinia instance that every view shares; disposing the shell unmounts them. Stores are added when a view needs one, mirroring state an owner already publishes, so there is never a second owner of the same state.

2. Rail. PanelChrome enforces one panel per side; the panel store mirrors each side's panels and the rail renders from it. Done.

3. Panels. Each template and its wiring become a component, keeping ids, classes, data-i18n text and CSS. A converted template is listed in build/applicationViews.js; its gev:template marker then expands to a .gev-view host (display: contents), and mountApplicationViews() (src/ui/views/index.js) renders the view into it before the page is translated and wired. createApplication() calls it too, so host pages need no change. Views belong to the page and are never unmounted. The loading screen stays static so it paints before any script runs. Markup tests read renderApplicationHtml() from src/testSupport, which renders the views on the server. Templates compile with Vue's preserve whitespace, which keeps the whitespace between elements as a single space, so a view renders as its template did; no view markup sits under a white-space: pre rule. Application views (src/ui/views/*View.vue) are kept out of Prettier; other components are formatted with strict whitespace sensitivity, so their source spacing is what renders. The markup has moved, unchanged: every template except the loading screen is a view.

   Next each view takes over its wiring: markup an owner builds with createElement becomes component markup that renders from a Pinia store the owner publishes to, and user actions come back to the owner through the store, so the owner keeps every decision. Static markup that the translation pass rewrites (data-i18n*) stays outside v-if and v-for, because re-rendering it would bring back the English; component text uses t() instead. Shared builders become components first and keep their imperative entry points until their owners are components: the rail cards, card blocks and timeline (src/ui/rail/) render through Vue's synchronous render() behind createRailCards(), createRailCardBlocks() and createRailTimeline(). Order: Scenes (done: SceneOptions and SceneShotList over the gev-scenes store), Weather (done: the owner renders WeatherReadout from the view it computes), Recent imagery (done: RecentImageryReadout and its day cards, the same way), Street level (done: StreetLevelPanel renders the gev-street-level store that StreetLevelControls publishes to; the controls keep their listeners, EXPAND, focus and resizing), CCTV (in progress: CctvPanel renders the buttons, CAL chip and meta line from the gev-cctv store; the picker, frame, source badge, calibration readout and summary are still written by CctvControls), Layers, Display, Context and Radio, the command dock, the phone shell, then Cockpit. Layers that write into the right rail directly gain a slot instead.

4. Cleanup. The build-time template expansion and the attribute translation pass are retired once nothing uses them. Hosts register panels and rail items through an explicit API instead of editing markup. Markup-string tests are replaced by component tests.

Verification

• Unit tests: stores and components run under npm test. Single-file components are compiled by a test loader; component tests render with @vue/test-utils and happy-dom. npm test registers the loader; to run one file that reaches a component (including anything importing the shell), use node --import=./build/registerVue.js --test <file>.
• Never pass happy-dom nodes to assert.equal or deepEqual: a failure prints both operands, and a node reaches the whole page and window, which runs the process out of memory. Compare nodes with assertSameNode() (src/testSupport/domAssert.mjs).
• Panels lifted out of a view keep its verbatim markup in src/ui/views/panels/, which Prettier leaves alone like the views.
• Visual parity: before/after screenshots of every panel at desktop and phone widths, in the default and Cyber themes, with the rail as the only expected difference.
• Browser QA: the selector-based scripts/qa-*.mjs suites keep passing.
• npm run format:check, npm run check:boundaries, npm run i18n and npm run build.