freeCodeCamp/guide/english/vue/control-flow/index.md

title
Control Flow

Control Flow

Conditionals

With Vue.js you can decide wheter to show or not a piece of code in you final page, depending on some condition. For example, imagine a form input that is required a text at least 8 characters long: if the user input is shorter than 8, than an error message should appear; but if the input is longer than 8, the message disappears.

But let's make a simpler example. We want to condition the exibition of a message to a counter:

<div id="app">
  <p v-if="counter > 10">
    This message is only rendered when the counter is greater than 10
  </p>
</div>

let app = new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  data: {
    counter: 0
  }
});

If you go to the console and start to increment the counter, when it crosses our threshold of 10, the message will be shown! Then, if you decrement counter, Vue.js will hide the message when counter gets lower than 10. For that, we used the directive v-if.

And you might be wondering if there's an else for that if. And there is the v-else. Notice that the v-else will always

• expect a v-if prior to it
• refers to the closest v-if in the page

Let's alter a little bit our first example to get this straight.

<div id="app">
  <p v-if="counter > 10">
    This message is only rendered when the counter is greater than 10
  </p>
  <p v-else>
    And this is the "otherwise" option
  </p>
</div>

let app = new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  data: {
    counter: 0
  }
});

Play a little with that by changing counter values and pay attention to the message shown.

Vue.js also has the v-else-if directive.

Loops

Vue.js also helps with the generation of multiple copies of the same code structure, with loops. The classic example is a list dynamically rendered.

<div id="app">
  <ul>
    <li v-for="item in list">
      {{ item }}
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

let app = new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  data: {
    list: [
      "shave",
      "do the dishes",
      "clean the sink",
      "pay the bill"
    ]
  }
});

Way easier than inserting a lot of <li>. And notice that whenever the list changes, the result will change acordingly. Try it out: open the console and push some string to the list with

app.list.push("something else");

As expected, the page rendered now has our brand new item!

Accessing current index in loops

v-for also supports an optional second argument for the index of the current item:

<div id="app">
  <ul>
    <li v-for="(item, index) in items">
      {{ index }}: {{ item }}
    </li>
  </ul>
</div>

This way, we can use index to style the first, last or even/odd list elements differently, or apply extra logic to our component.