I become frustrated with my inability to make any progress on this project, so I decided to reach
for a tool that I consider highly reliable but also incredibly time-consuming and boring: test
driven development.
In this case, I wrote a story about how I wanted to see the first page rendered: just put the HTML
tag, completely unadorned, that will handle the first page of the wizard. Then, add an event handler
that will send the updated content to some parent object, since what we really want is to
orchestrate the state of the user's input with a centralized location. Then, rather than fiddling
with the attributes and properties of the various pages, I wanted them to be able to "look up" the
values they want, much as we'd expect a standalone form to be able to pull its values from the
server, so I added a context object that receives the update event and incorporates the new
knowledge about the state of the process into itself.
The result is surprisingly satisfying: the first page renders cleanly, displays the content that we
want, and as we fiddle with, we can *watch in real time* as the results of the context are updated
and retransmitted to all receiving objects. And the sending object gets the results so it
re-renders, but it ends up looking the same as it was before the render.
Ken Sternberg
dependabot[bot]