[Webpack 2] Maintain sane file sizes with webpack code splitting

As a Single Page Application grows in size, the size of the payload can become a real problem for performance. In this lesson, learn how to leverage code splitting to easily implement lazy loading for your application to load only the code necessary for a particular feature or functionality.

 

Here we loads facts at the beginning. So this will be bundled into the bundle.js file. This is not good enought if the application becomes large.

import {$on} from './helpers'
import * as facts from './facts'

const factsList = document.getElementById('facts-list')
const factText = document.getElementById('fact-text')

$on(factsList, 'click', ({target: {dataset: {fact}}}) => {
  if (!facts) {
      factText.innerText = facts.defaultFact
      return
  }
   factText.innerText = facts[fact]
})

 

So what we want to do is loading the file on demand. And wepack will help to load file on runtime.

import {$on} from './helpers'

const factsList = document.getElementById('facts-list')
const factText = document.getElementById('fact-text')

$on(factsList, 'click', ({target: {dataset: {fact}}}) => {
    if (!fact) {
        return System.import('./facts/default-fact').then(setFactText)
    }
    System.import('./facts/' + fact).then(setFactText)

    function setFactText({fact: animalFact}) {
        factText.innerText = animalFact
    }
})

To do that, we need to tell Webpack to import file when it needed by using :

System.import('./facts/' + fact)

It returns a promise, then we do parse the stuff:

    System.import('./facts/' + fact).then(setFactText)

    function setFactText({fact: animalFact}) {
        factText.innerText = animalFact
    }