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Blits - Lightning 3 App Development Framework ​

Displaying Images ​

Now that we've covered the basics of creating Elements, as well as styling and positioning them, it's time to move away from these boring rectangles and explore how you can incorporate images into your App.

In Blits is very easy to display an image. Simply add the src attribute to an Element, specifying the image's location.

For local images, make sure to place them in the public folder of your App (e.g., public/assets/background.jpg or public/images/logo.png) and refer to them with a relative path (but omitting the public folder as root).

Remote images are also supported and can be linked directly (e.g., http://mycdn.com/artists/jimi_hendrix/woodstock.jpg).

xml
<Element src="images/logo.png" w="100" h="80" />
<Element src="http://mycdn.com/artists/jimi_hendrix/woodstock.jpg" w="1920" h="1080" />
<Element src="images/logo.png" w="100" h="80" />
<Element src="http://mycdn.com/artists/jimi_hendrix/woodstock.jpg" w="1920" h="1080" />

Sizing and Scaling ​

Make sure to give your Element a width (w ) and a height (h) attribute. Images will not be rendered if they don't have both attributes present. The Lightning renderer will scale the image to fit these exact dimensions

For the best performance, it's important to keep your source images as small as possible. If you're displaying an image at 200px x 200px, make sure the image is exactly that size or smaller. The latter option may lead to some quality loss, but can positively impact the overall performance of your App.

Colorization ​

You also have the option to colorize an image on the fly. Just add a color attribute to the Element with a src attribute. You can use a single color, or apply a gradient.

By default all Elements with a src attribute get the a solid white background, with the result that the actual colors of the image will be shown.

xml
<Element
  w="200"
  h="300"
  :src="$src"
  color="{top: '#fff', bottom: '#000'}"
/>
<Element
  w="200"
  h="300"
  :src="$src"
  color="{top: '#fff', bottom: '#000'}"
/>

Asynchronous Loading ​

All images are loaded asynchronously (and can possibly fail to load), even those local to your App. Blits allows you to easily hook into the loaded and error events of image Elements.

You can use this, for example, to only make something visible once an image is fully loaded. Or to display a fallback image when an remote image can't be retrieved.

xml
<Element src="http://mycdn.com/lightning.jpg" @loaded="$revealPage" @error="$showFallback" />
<Element src="http://mycdn.com/lightning.jpg" @loaded="$revealPage" @error="$showFallback" />

Note how events are prefixed with a @ sign.

Considering the template above you would do something like the following in the methods key of your Component configuration object:

js
{
  //...
  methods: {
    revealPage(dimensions) {
      this.$log.info('Image dimensions', dimensions.w, dimensions.h)
      this.show = true
    },
    showFallback(error) {
      this.$log.error('Image failed to load', error)
      this.showBackupImage()
    }
  }
}
{
  //...
  methods: {
    revealPage(dimensions) {
      this.$log.info('Image dimensions', dimensions.w, dimensions.h)
      this.show = true
    },
    showFallback(error) {
      this.$log.error('Image failed to load', error)
      this.showBackupImage()
    }
  }
}

The loaded event receives the images dimensions as it's argument and the error event receives an error message explaining the failure.