Using External Components

Learn how to embed your own widget into Codelessly's layout.

Codelessly offers a wide range of components that can be the building blocks for most of your layouts. However, there can be times when you want to use a very specific widget that is not yet available in Codelessly or you want to use a widget from a third-party package into your codelessly layout.

To fulfill this use-case, we have a component called External Component in the components library.

External Component

As the name implies, this component behaves like an iFrame and allows you to hook your own widget into it programmatically. You can pass this widget from CodelesslyWidget using our Cloud UI SDK.

Any custom widget can be rendered inside this external component as long as it can respect its constraints.

Usage

1. Like other components, you can drag and drop this component in any of your layouts.

2. Open the settings panel for this component by clicking on the floating Settings button next to it.
3. Provide a unique identifier for this component. This id will used to identify the component from CodelesslyWidget in the SDK to map it to a widget builder.

External Component configuration

4. From the SDK side, where you are using CodelesslyWidget, pass your widget using the externalComponentBuilders constructor parameter.

return CodelesslyWidget(
  config: CodelesslyConfig(authToken: '<auth_token>'),
  layoutID: '<layout_id>',
  externalComponentBuilders: {
    'my_custom_widget': (context) {
      return const Placeholder();
    },
  },
)

Note that the key needs to match exactly to the unique external ID provided in the Editor.

You can have as many external components as you want. You can pass any widget including StatefulWidget and manage its state yourself. You can provide all of them in CodelesslyWidget by using their unique ids.

return CodelesslyWidget(
  config: CodelesslyConfig(authToken: '<auth_token>'),
  layoutID: '<layout_id>',
  externalComponentBuilders: {
    'widget1': (context) {
      return const Placeholder();
    },
    'widget2': (context) {
      return const Placeholder();
    },
  },
)