Benefits of embedding Squirrel projects
Welcome to the second blog in our mini-series on Squirrel’s Web View Component (WVC). In the first blog, we looked at how the WVC can be used to embed external content into your Squirrel project. In this blog (part 2), we take you even further and explore how you can embed one Squirrel project within another enabling you to:
- Allow multiple people to work on one project at a time
- Create reusable components that can be used in multiple projects.
Multiple people on one project
For large Squirrel projects, the WVC can really speed up the time it takes to build out a project. This is because it allows more than one person to work on a project at the same time.
The process is pretty simple: one person builds the main Squirrel project (the “parent” project). And other people build mini projects (“child” projects) to embed in the parent project. It’s absolutely seamless in terms of what the end-user sees. It will look and work exactly as it would if it were a single project, be that an app or a dashboard, or a value calculator.
Several people can work on a project at the same time
Getting the child projects into the parent project is easy. You simply bind the URLs of the exported child projects to the WVCs and hey presto, they’ll appear in the WVC frames on the canvas.
Child projects in the Squirrel parent project
And of course, if you want to harness the logic of the spreadsheet, you can do so by coupling the WVC with the External Parameters function. This opens up two-way communication between the parent and child projects. It means you can send spreadsheet values from the parent to the child and vice versa.
Reusable components
If you want to create reusable components that can be used in multiple projects, the WVC makes that possible too. The process is similar to that of above. By making use of the parent-child principle, you build your components as child projects and embed them into the parent projects by binding the WVC to the child URLs.
The WVC becomes really useful in scenarios where you need to maintain a consistent look and feel across your projects. For example, you might need to update your projects following a change to your company’s logo and brand colour. You’ll simply need to update and re-export your child projects. And when you refresh your parent projects they will pull through the changes you have made without affecting the bindings and communications between the two. It will save you a whole heap of time because it means you don’t need to go into project after project to make the required branding changes.
Using the Web View Component to create reusable components in your Squirrel projects
To summarise
Squirrel’s WVC is a pretty powerful tool to have in your toolbox, especially when paired with the External Parameters function. It opens the door to several people working on a project at the same time and gives you a way to create a set of reusable components that can be easily updated. It increases efficiency, saves time, and helps to reduce the file size of your parent project by having some of the components saved out as child projects.
Hopefully, you can see how useful the WVC is and although we said it in the first blog, we’re going to say it again here… we can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with the WVC in your projects! Please do give us a shout on social media and share your ideas with the Squirrel community.
If you missed the first blog on Squirrel’s Web View Component, check it out here: https://squirrel365.io/web-view-part-1-embedding-web-content/.
To learn how to configure the WVC and each of its properties, take a look at Squirrel’s knowledge base article.
