⭐Custom components 2.0

UI Bakery offers a large number of built-in components that you can use in your applications. What is more, you can also create custom components if you want to add functionality not available in our component list. Custom components 2.0 feature allows you to utilize AI and its capabilities to quickly and easily create functional components that you can add to your applications. The feature has a convenient Code Editor, where the code is split into separate files. You can review and tweak everything right inside the Editor if needed. Also new custom components are reusable, meaning you can use them across multiple projects, not just one (unlike the previous custom components).

In this article, we'll dive into how this feature works and provide some use case examples as well.

Overview

You can access the list of all your custom components, as well as create new ones, in the Library section of the workspace menu. Here, click the + button and select Custom component or click the Custom Components 2.0 tile at the bottom of the Library list to launch the AI-powered component builder.

Give your component a name and proceed to the Builder mode to start generating the component.

Building a component

To build a component with AI, you simply need to type in what you want to create or attach an image of a similar UI as a visual aid. The AI Assistant will start working and you'll be able to see all the steps he takes while generating a component based on your prompts.

Let's explore how the custom component works in more details👇

a. This is where you need to type in your prompt or attach an image of what you want to generate.

b. Shows the process and steps the AI Assistant takes based on your prompt.

c. Here you can preview the result component after each iteration the AI takes.

d. Click Checkpoint to revert to the previous version to undo any changes you made or start generating again from a specific iteration.

e. In the Code tab, you can inspect the generated code and tweak it to better suit your needs.

f. You can pass your data to AI in two ways:

• Create and run actions directly from the custom component and ask the AI to use them.

• Tell the AI which props should come from the host app - you can check or modify the generated data.json file. It is located in the Code tab and it contains demo settings of the custom component.

g. Click Release to publish the custom component.

That is the basic flow of creating a custom component - as you see it's quite simple. To watch it in action on specific examples, make sure to check out this section.

Using tokens

Every month, 2M free tokens are assigned to users - you can use them to generate custom components. Each time you make a request, tokens will be deducted from the balance taking into account the input, output, and cached input ratios.

The actual tokens balance is displayed in the header when in Builder mode.

This way, you'll be able to see how many tokens you have left and, if you've already spent all of them and need more, you'll be able to buy them right from the Builder. The Not enough credits on your account error will be displayed if you try making requests, and either from there or from the tokens balance in the header, you can click Buy. You'll be redirected to the billing page where you can buy more tokens. It's possible to buy 10M tokens in a single transaction.

Working with a component

Custom components are integrated with UI Bakery using special hooks from the @uibakery/data library. They allow the components to interact with the application, specifically receive data, call actions, and trigger events.

import { useData } from '@uibakery/data';

// Get the user's name (defaults to 'Guest')
const userName = useData('user.name', 'Guest');

// Get the full user object
const user = useData('user', {});

import { useLoadAction, useMutateAction } from '@uibakery/data';

// Loading a list of products
const [products, isLoading, error, refreshProducts] = useLoadAction('loadProducts', []);

// Action to update a product
const [updateProduct] = useMutateAction('updateProduct');

// Calling the update action
updateProduct({ id: 1, name: 'New Name' });

import { triggerEvent } from '@uibakery/data';

// Trigger an event about product creation
triggerEvent({ type: 'productCreated', data: { productId: 123 } });

General usage example

import { useData, useLoadAction, useMutateAction, triggerEvent } from '@uibakery/data';

function MyComponent() {
  // Receiving data from UI Bakery
  const componentData = useData('someData', {});

  // Loading data via an action
  const [items, loading, error, refreshItems] = useLoadAction('loadItems', []);

  // Action for creating data
  const [createItem] = useMutateAction('createItem');

  const handleCreate = () => {
    const newItem = { name: 'A New Item' };
    // Call the action
    createItem(newItem);
    // Trigger the event
    triggerEvent({ type: 'itemCreated', data: newItem });
  };

  // ... rest of the component code
}

Publishing a component

Once you're ready to release your component, click the Release button in the upper right corner of the screen. Select your version, add a description if you want, and choose the environments you want to deploy to.

Adding a component to an app

You can add any custom component you created to your application. And, as we've mentioned before, you can add custom components to multiple projects. To add a component, click the Library tab of the Components section in the app's Builder mode and drag the component you need to the working area.

In the right side panel, you'll be able to access and modify the custom component's settings as well as set On Init and On Event triggers. Here also at the top, you can click the Edit button to make any changes you need to the component, and after that you can click Reload to refresh these changes in the app.

Use case examples

Now, let's review some examples of custom components you can generate in UI Bakery. Watch our interactive demos below and learn how you can build similar components yourself.

To-do list

Know Your Employee (KYE) form

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