Vue Dual Listbox MultiSelect Dropdown Component

vue-listbox-multiselect

Vue Dual list-box multi-select drop-down component for enterprise applications.

Motivation

There are several good multi-select components available for Vue. However, none are suitable for enterprise app development. In a typical enterprise app, you are often challenged offering a simple drop-down which allows the user to filter through thousands of categorized items from the server, and allows the user to select hundreds. At Banner Edge Media, we have been using a similar component for multiple years. As we migrate to Vue, we wanted to share this component with the Vue community, and together make it even better.

Setup

Install:

# NPM
npm install @banneredge/vue-listbox-multiselect

Usage:

<script lang="ts">
import Vue from 'vue';
import VueListboxMultiselect from '@banneredge/vue-listbox-multiselect';
import dataSet from './usCities';

export default Vue.extend({
  name: 'ServeDev',
  components: {
    VueListboxMultiselect
  },
  data() {
    return {
      selectedList: [] as any[],
    };
  },
  methods: {
    async search(query: string): Promise<any[]> {
      const ids = this.selectedList.map((x) => x.id);
      let subset = dataSet.filter((x) => !ids.includes(`${x.state}-${x.city}`));

      if (!query) {
        subset = subset.slice(0, 100);
      } else {
        const q = query.toLowerCase();
        subset = subset.filter((x) => x.city.toLowerCase().includes(q) || x.state.toLowerCase().includes(q));
        subset = subset.slice(0, 100);
      }

      return subset.map((x: any) => {
        return {
          id: `${x.state}-${x.city}`,
          value: x.city,
          group: x.state
        }
      });
    },
  },
});
</script>

<template>
  <v-app id="app">
    <link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@mdi/[email protected]/css/materialdesignicons.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
    <vue-listbox-multiselect
        v-model="selectedList"
        :search-function="search"
        placeholder="Search Items"
        style="width: 300px; margin: 20px auto"
        size="medium"
        :hide-search="false"
    />
  </v-app>
</template>

Notes:

• The current version is heavily dependent on Vuetify with mdi icons for the arrows
• There is no direct way to pass in the items, everything must go through the async search function. The function will get called with a blank query on load.
• You must implement your own limit, filtering and excluding selected items (See examples). This is set up because we assume most use-cases will be calling the server for data and that will need to be handled on the server.
• There is lots of room for improvement, so please check out the Roadmap and contribute!
• Current recommendation is to pull 100 results with each query. Users do not need to scroll through more, they can just search to get what they need.

Props

Roadmap:

• Add demo and documentation static site.
• Clean up the code a bit and add comments.
• Add interfaces for parameters
  • We should add a few more features before making contracts
• Speed it up
  • It gets a little slow when you have 1000 items, and you have to group and sort them
  • Keeping the limit to 100 makes it work well.
• Test browser compatibility.
  • Seems to work well in Chrome, Firefox, Edge
  • We should establish what we support.
• Remove Vuetify dependency
  • Vuetify provides some very cool pre-made components, but we want this to be usable with any library.
• Figure out a smart way to do widths.
  • Sometimes if we have a large monitor and long item names, we want to stretch it very wide. If the item names are not long it does not look good.
• Add a prop to Hide Search (May want to keep it for all use-cases?)
  • Sometimes we want to use this with a very small list and don't need the search box.
• Add test coverage?
• Add a way to reset it to original state dynamically
  • Reset selected list
  • Re-run blank query
  • Through Emitter?
• Add slots to make it fully customizable
• Add more input interactions
  • Currently Supported:
    • Click (Select)
    • Ctrl-Click (Select Multiple)
    • Double-Click (Move Item)
  • Needed:
    • Shift-Click
    • Ctrl-A ?
    • Move with arrow keys?
    • Shift-arrow keys?

GitHub