We are happy to announce the release of Bolero version 0.2. Bolero is a library that enables writing full-stack applications in F#, whose client side runs in WebAssembly using Blazor.

Install the latest project template with:

dotnet new -i Bolero.Templates

Features

Router: full path specification

In Bolero 0.1, you could customize the path for a router using [<EndPoint>]:

type Page =
    | [<EndPoint "/">]
      Home
    | [<EndPoint "/article">]
      Article of id: int
    | [<EndPoint "/list">]
      List of page: int * tag: string

In the above example, the value Article 42 represents the URL /article/42, and the value List(1, "bolero") represents the URL /list/1/bolero.

Bolero 0.2 introduces full path specification. You can now indicate the exact shape of the path with [<EndPoint>], with parameters represented between {braces}. This makes it possible to have several paths that share a common prefix. The {*asterisk} syntax is also supported to indicate the rest of the path.

type Page =
    | [<EndPoint "/">]
      Home
    | [<EndPoint "/article/{id}">]
      Article of id: int
    | [<EndPoint "/list/{page}">]
      List of page: int
    | [<EndPoint "/list/{page}/tagged/{*tags}">]
      ListTagged of page: int * tags: list<string>

In the above example, the value List 2 represents the URL /list/2, and the value ListTagged(2, ["bolero"; "fsharp"]) represents the URL /list/2/tagged/bolero/fsharp.

Bolero 0.1-style simple prefix specification is still supported. See the documentation for more details.

DOM element references

It is sometimes necessary to call JavaScript functions on the DOM element corresponding to a Bolero node. Bolero 0.2 now provides the attribute attr.bindRef to retrieve a reference to the corresponding element. It is typically used in a component. For example, given this JavaScript function:

function focus(elt) {
    elt.focus();
}

You can call it on your own elements like so:

open Bolero
open Bolero.Html
open Microsoft.JSInterop // Use Blazor's interop features

/// Interop binding to the JavaScript function
let focus (elt: ElementRef) =
    JSRuntime.Current.InvokeAsync("focus", elt) |> ignore

type MyComponent() =
    inherit ElmishComponent<Model, Message>()

    /// Create an element ref for our input tag
    let inputRef = ElementRefBinder()

    override this.View model dispatch =
        concat [
            // Bind the input element
            input [attr.bindRef inputRef]
            button [
                // Call the JavaScript function on the bound element
                on.click (fun _ -> focus inputRef.ref)
            ] [text "Focus the input"]
        ]

Try F# on WebAssembly

I will take this occasion to talk about the improvements that have been done to the Bolero-based Try F# on WebAssembly since its announcement; they've been out for a few weeks, but haven't been mentioned on this blog yet.

• We added support for asynchronous code, and in particular HTTP requests.

  To run asynchronous code, create a function AsyncMain : unit -> Async<unit>.

  To perform HTTP requests within AsyncMain, use Env.Http : System.Net.Http.HttpClient.

  See for example the JSON type provider snippet, which queries the GitHub API to list the repositories in the fsbolero organization.

• You can now invoke code completion using Ctrl+Space. It can take several seconds to appear on a bare identifier, but it is quite fast when invoked right after a dot.

Happy coding!