@abdalhamid/tourguidejs

Tourguide.js

Custom version of tourguides without icons

Simple, lightweight library for creating guided tours for your web, apps and more.

A tour guide is a person who provides assistance, information on cultural, historical and contemporary heritage to people on organized tours and individual clients at educational establishments, religious and historical sites, museums, and at venues of other significant interest, attractions sites. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_guide]

Fiddle with It

Want to see how it works right away? Try on JSFiddle

Install Tourguide.js

npm i tourguidejs

Why do I need Tourguide.js

Every time you build you next awesome web app, you sit back and stare lovingly at your handy-work :) But then inevitably someone comes along asking one and the same inconvenient question: "So, how do I use it?"

You try to explain, but people are just not getting it! You write how-tos, lengthy docs, and step-by-step guides, and yet, nothing seems to be enough.

This is why we built Tourguide.js - a simple yet powerful explainer utility, designed to help you make the reply a little bit less painful. Because, let's face it - picture is worth a 1000 words:

Getting started

There are a few ways you can use Tourguide.js

Fiddle with it

Want to see how it works right away? Try on JSFiddle

CommonJS

Download tourguide.min.js, add it to your project libraries, and then include it on page:

<script src="tourguide.min.js"></script>

ES Module support

If you use ES modules in your project (Webpack, Rollup) import Tourguide.js like so:

import Tourguide from "tourguidejs";

Usage

Before use, Tourguide.js must be instantiated:

var tourguide = new Tourguide({options});

• root: root element the tour steps will attach to; default is document.body

• selector: if you want to use content based tour approach you can use this option to specify the common selector for the tour steps; default is [data-tour]

• animationspeed: speed of all tour built-in animations; default is 300

• padding: additional padding to add to step highlighter; default is 5(px)

• steps: if you choose to take JSON based tour approach provide use this property to provide the data; default is null

• src: if you want to load the tour from a remote URL you may specify it here; default is null

• request: if you want to load the tour from a remote URL you may provide request headers here

• onStart: callback function triggered when the tour starts

• onStop: callback function triggered when tour stops

• onComplete: callback triggered when tour completes

• onStep: callback triggered when a tour step is shown

• onAction: callback triggered when user clicks on the highlighted element

Once instantiated you can use tourguide instance a several different ways:

Content based approach

Simplest approach is to read the descriptions right off the elements on page. This works best if you are using an MVC approach in your application. Simply add tour descriptions to the HTML elements in your page template:

<button aria-label="Collaborate" data-tour="step: 1; title: Step1; content: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet">
  Collaborate
</button>

• step<number>: tour step sequence number

• title<string>: tour step title

• content<string>: tour step description

• image?<url>: tour step illustration

?* indicates the property is optional*

In this mode you can simply use Tourguide.js as-is:

var tourguide = new Tourguide();
tourguide.start();

JSON based approach

You may also write your own steps definition using JSON notation:

`[`
`  {`
`    "selector": null,`
`    "step": 1,`
`    "title": "Lets take a moment and look around Docsie library",`
`    "content": "Click a button to advance to the next step of this tour.<br/> To stop this tour at any time click a button in the top-right corner.",`
`    "image": "https://somehost.com/image.jpeg"`
`  },`
`  {`
`    "selector": "[data-component=library]:first-of-type",`
`    "step": 2,`
`    "title": "Shelf",`
`    "content": "Just like a real library &lt;mark&gt;Docsie&lt;/mark&gt; starts with &lt;dfn&gt;shelves&lt;/dfn&gt;. Each &lt;dfn&gt;shelf&lt;/dfn&gt; represnts a separate collection of ideas. You may think of them as individual websites, or website sections."`
`  }`
`]`

• selector?<string>: CSS selector used to find the target element (optional)

• step<number>: tour step sequence number

• title<string>: tour step title

• content<string>: tour step description

• image?<url>: tour step illustration (optional)

?* indicates the property is optional*

Once you have the complete JSON description for each of your tour steps you will have to initialize Tourguide.js passing your JSON as steps: property:

var steps = [...];
var tourguide = new Tourguide({steps: steps});
tourguide.start();

Remote URL approach

You may also want to load the steps remotely. To do so simply provide the target src as one of the Tourguide.js init params:

var tourguide = new Tourguide({src: "https://somedomain.com/tours/guide.json"});
tourguide.start();

Controlling the tour

Once your tour has started you have several ways to manually control the tour flow:

tourguide.start([step])

Start the tour at any time by calling start(). You may optionally provide the step number to start the tour at a specific step (by default a tour always starts at step 1):

tourguide.start(2)

tourguide.stop()

Stop the tour at any moment by calling stop()

tourguide.next()

Causes tour to go to the next step in the sequence

tourguide.previous()

Causes tour to go to the previous step in the sequence

tourguide.go(step)

Causes tour to go to the step specified

tourguide.go(2)

Additional properties

• tourguide.currentstep: returns the current step object

• tourguide.length: return the number of steps on the tour

• tourguide.steps: returns the tour steps as JSON notation

• tourguide.hasnext: return true if there are steps remaining in the tour, otherwise returns false

• tourguide.options: returns Tourguide.js options object

Attaching callbacks

Tourguide.js supports several helpful callbacks to help you better control the tour. You may optionally pass the callback functions into the tour instance at initialization time:

var tourguide = new Tourguide({
  `onStart:function(options){...},`
  `onStop:function(options){...},`
  `onComplete:function(){...},`
  `onStep:function(currentstep, type){...},`
  `onAction:function(currentstep, e){...}`
});

onStart

Fires when the guided tour is started. The callback function will receive a single param:

• options: tour options object

onStop

Fires when the guided tour stops. The callback function will receive a single param:

• options: tour options object

onComplete

Fires when the guided tour is complete. The callback function will receives no params.

NOTE: onStop is always fired first, before onComplete is fired

onStep

Fires when tour step is activated. The callback function receives two params:

• currentstep: tour step object

• type: string representing the current direction of the tor; can be one of: "previous" | "next"

onAction

Fires when user has clicked on the step target. The callback function receives two params:

• currentstep: tour step object

• event: MouseEvent onclick

Step object

Each step of the tour is wrapped into a Step class. This allows you to have a direct access to the individual step properties and actions:

• target: returns the target element step is attached to

• el: returns the step view element

• show(): show step element

• hide(): hide step element

You can obtain the current step object an any time during the tour execution by calling tourguide.currentstep property:

var currentstep = tourguide.currentstep;
var stepTarget = currentstep.target;
var stepView = currentstep.el;

License

Tourguide.js is licensed under BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License

A permissive license similar to the BSD 2-Clause License, but with a 3rd clause that prohibits others from using the name of the project or its contributors to promote derived products without written consent.