why-did-you-render

Track why your vue components are updating

Sometimes a component is updating causing a rerender and you know that it shouldn't do it. Most of the times it is because a new object is created on some parent component, althought it hold the same values, it causes an update.

Usage

import WhyDidYouRender from 'why-did-you-render'
 
// install it as a global mixin
Vue.mixin(WhyDidYouRender)
 
export default {
  name: 'MyComponent',
  debug: true, // set this flag
}

It will log something like this

[WhyDidYouRender:watcher] MyComponent propName { val: currentValue, old: previousValue }
[WhyDidYouRender:watcher] MyComponentParent parentComputedName { val: currentValue, old: previousValue }
[WhyDidYouRender:UPDATED] MyComponent

We can see that the MyComponent has updated and it has been caused by a prop named propName and we can see too that its parent has also experience a mutation on something named parentComputedName, it looks like the trigger which caused our component to update.

We will receive also the current and previous values of the mutated variables

How does it work?

Very simple, it just adds a watchers for everything inside the component with the debug: true flag and does the same recursively for its parent recursively.

In a first instance I was skipping adding watchers on inner Vue attributes, those that start with _ or $, but sometimes the mutation was caused by $attrs or $listeners when using v-on="$listeners" or v-bind="$attrs and this helps to track it too.

Inspiration

I just wanted something like https://github.com/welldone-software/why-did-you-render#readme but for Vue