Component Pack Component Definition Property questions

alwaysLoad
1. If a Component is marked as alwaysLoad, then any dependencies for this Component will always be loaded into any Skuid Page, as long as the parent Component Pack is active.
2. The only dependencies that Component Packs deal with are customLabels, js and css.

pathsToChildComponents

1. This is an advanced property that should be used whenever the component will render / contain other Components, addable via Component Acceptors from the Page Composer (we don’t have documentation on how to do this — yet — so this is pretty unlikely). For instance, if you are building an advanced layout component such as an Accordion, that can contain Child Components within the parts of the Accordion, then you’d need to use this, otherwise if you added a Component such as a Chart into your Accordion, Skuid will not know that it needs to load the dependencies for the Chart component at runtime.

So as far as what “paths” actually needs to look like: it’s roughly a “selector” syntax (CSS-style) of how to traverse your Component’s XML tree to find the nodes containing child components. As an example, the Tab Set component’s “pathToContents” property is [“tabs>tab>components”], because the Tab Set components’ XML structure is something like <skuidvis__chart… /><skootable… /> The property is an Array because there could be multiple paths to the locations of Child Components. If your component just has a root level node, then your pathToContents property would be [“components”]

Thanks Zach. A couple of follow-ups if you don’t mind…

alwaysLoad - This property and customLabelDepdencies are at the component level. However, js & css are at the pack level. Given your feedback, just want to make sure I’m understanding correctly that for a component that is marked alwaysLoad=true, any customLabelDependencies for that specific component plus all js and all css for the pack will be loaded, correct? Or can you specify js & css for the individual component and then only those are loaded and not the js & css at the pack level? The documentation doesn’t state js & css component level properties but based on your answer, I’m thinking that they might exist and it’s just not documented yet.

pathsToChildComponents - Selector syntax based on xml config makes sense. A few questions here:

1. Currently the guidance (here) is to use factory methods when a custom component contains child components. Does using the pathsToChildComponents replace the need for this?
2. Will Skuid walk the entire chain of components beyond the first level children when selector syntax is used? In other words, if the top level component contains components and those components contain components (e.g. <skootable…/>), will the entire chain be processed assuming the selector points to the top level only?
3. How does the server side of child components come in to play for components that have corresponding APEX implementation?

Thanks!