The presence of Storybook’s preview-head.html file in the repository
is a constant annoyance: it’s only needed for Storybook and it changes
all the time, producing a lot of Git noise. By making it a separate
step to have the Ember CLI server running before starting Storybook,
we no longer need to have preview-head in the repository. It needed to
be present because there was a race condition where it was sometimes
not generated in time for the Storybook parallel startup.
I originally planned to add component documentation, but as this dragged on and I found that JSDoc-to-Markdown sometimes needed hand-tuning, I decided to skip it and focus on replicating what was already present in Freestyle. Adding documentation is a finite task that can be revisited in the future.
My goal was to migrate everything from Freestyle with as few changes as possible. Some adaptations that I found necessary:
• the DelayedArray and DelayedTruth utilities that delay component rendering until slightly after initial render because without them:
◦ charts were rendering with zero width
◦ the JSON viewer was rendering with empty content
• Storybook in Ember renders components in a routerless/controllerless context by default, so some component stories needed changes:
◦ table pagination/sorting stories access to query params, which necessitates some reaching into Ember internals to start routing and dynamically generate a Storybook route/controller to render components into
◦ some stories have a faux controller as part of their Storybook context that hosts setInterval-linked dynamic computed properties
• some jiggery-pokery with anchor tags
◦ inert href='#' had to become href='javascript:;
◦ links that are actually meant to navigate need target='_parent' so they don’t navigate inside the Storybook iframe
Maybe some of these could be addressed by fixes in ember-cli-storybook but I’m wary of digging around in there any more than I already have, as I’ve lost a lot of time to Storybook confusion and frustrations already 😞
The STORYBOOK=true environment variable tweaks some environment settings to get things working as expected in the Storybook context.
I chose to:
• use angle bracket invocation within stories rather than have to migrate them soon after having moved to Storybook
• keep Freestyle around for now for its palette and typeface components
This sets a default-but-query-configurable Faker seed in development,
via faker-seed. It also changes uses of Math.random to use Faker’s
randomness so auto-generated data remains stable in development.
Buck Doyle