API is a bit confusing about controls-state

[marcofugaro]

Interesting.. what do you still find confusing nowadays? What the hardest stuff to remember?

[rreusser]

A lot of the trickiness is contained in this section:

controls-state/src/fields/section.js

Line 85 in 60011d7

Object.keys(inputFields).forEach((fieldName) => {

state is actually "field accessor" object that returns values when you query state.propname rather than the field instance itself. With the exception of section. state.section returns a field accessor object for that section.

The result is this:

• state.propname: returns a value
• state.$field.propname: returns the field instance so that you can operate on it
• state.sectionname: returns a "field accessor" with properties defined so that…
• state.sectionname.propname: returns a value. but of course what if we want the instance, so that…
• state.sectionname.$field.propname: will return the field instance

The goal was to make a very simple API for 95% of the use cases, which are just querying values. The downside is that I get a little turned around when navigating the internals.