This article is a guest series by the great Ekene Eze. He’s leading the Developer Experience team at Flutterwave and wrote this blog post through the Write for the Community program.

This series will walk you through the processes of setting up your own food ordering application and by extension any e-commerce app using modern development tools like Strapi, Gridsome and Snipcart.

Table of Contents: 1. Part 1 - Generating a Strapi app and creating products 2. Part 2 - Setting up a Gridsome project 3. Part 3 - Consuming products with Gridsome and GraphQL 4. Part 4 - Creating single product views with Gridsome templates 5. Part 5 - Implementing cart and checkout with Snipcart 6. Part 6 - Deploying the apps

In the last part, we successfully connected our Gridsome application to fetch products from our Strapi backend and display them for users. In this part, we will create single product views with Gridsome templates so that customers can open each product, view more details about it, and also have the opportunity to place orders.

Creating single product views with Gridsome templates

At the moment, we have a product listing page where we can view all products. But clicking on any of the products will lead to a 404 page as we can see below:

Next, let's make it possible for users to view the product pages using Gridsome templates. Gridsome uses templates to create single pages for nodes in a collection. Let's see how that works. In the project's src/templates folder, create a new file called Product.vue and set it up like so:

<!-- src/templates/Product.vue -->
<template>
  <Layout>
    <template>
      <v-card elevation="0" class="mx-auto center mt-5 mb-3" max-width="900">
        <v-img
          class="white--text align-end"
          height="200px"
          width="300px"
          :src="`http://localhost:1337${this.$page.product.image}`"
        >
        </v-img>
        <v-card-title>{{ this.$page.product.title }}</v-card-title>
        <v-card-text class="text--primary">
          <div>{{ this.$page.product.description }}</div>
        </v-card-text>
        <v-card-subtitle class="pb-0">
          <h3>Instructions</h3>
          {{ this.$page.product.instructions }}
        </v-card-subtitle>
        <v-card-actions>
          <v-btn
            rounded
            outlined
            color="orange"
            text
          >
            Add to cart
          </v-btn>
          <v-spacer></v-spacer>
          <v-rating
            :value="this.$page.product.rating"
            color="amber"
            dense
            half-increments
            readonly
            size="14"
          ></v-rating>
          <span>
            <v-card-title>${{ this.$page.product.price }}</v-card-title>
          </span>
        </v-card-actions>
      </v-card>
    </template>
  </Layout>
</template>

<page-query>
query Products($id: ID!) {
  product(id: $id) {
    id
    title
    image
    description
    price,
    instructions,
    rating
  }
}
</page-query>

<script>
export default {};
</script>

In the snippet above, we created a new single view product template. In the template, we use Vuetify's UI components (card, buttons etc) to organize the view of the product's details. Finally, to ensure that we route the appropriate product to its equivalent details page, we write a page query that will return individual product details with respect to the ID we pass into it.

To ensure that this behavior is achieved, we need to update the gridsome.config.js file in the project root directory:

    // gridsome.config.js
    module.exports = {
      siteName: "Gridsome",
      plugins: [],
      templates: {
        Product: "/products/:id",
      },
    };

This is how to set up Gridsome templates and routes. You can learn more about it and other possible configuration option here.

With this, we should be able to route to our individual product pages without hassle. Let's check back on the browser:

Now that we have the template and single page routes setup, let's add the Shop and Support navigations on the header for completeness.

Navigation

In Gridsome, every new file created in the pages directory maps to a new route automatically. This means that in order for us to show different pages for the /shop route and the /support route, all we need to do is create those pages and populate it with our contents of choice. In my case, I will display the same products we have in the homepage in the /shop page and display a contact form in the /support page. Create a new pages/shop.vue file and update it with the snippet below:

    <!-- src/pages/shop.vue -->
    <template>
      <Layout>
        <Products />
      </Layout>
    </template>
    <page-query>
    query{
      products: allProduct{
        edges{
          node{
            id,
            title,
            description,
            rating,
            image,
            price
          }
        }
      }
    }
    </page-query>
    <script>
    import Products from "../components/Products";
    export default {
      components: {
        Products,
      },
    };
    </script>

Basically, what we are doing is rendering the Products component again in this page such that when users navigate to it, they still see a list of products to order. You can organize your app differently, but this should be enough for the scope of this series.

We'll do the same for the /support route, create a new pages/support.vue file. In this file, we are going to display a form where users can type in their questions and send to the site admins. Because I have this habit of implementing validations on my forms, I will use vee-validate to handle validations on the form. Install it with the command below:

npm i vee-validate

Next, open the support.vue file and update it with the snippet below:

    <!-- src/pages/support.vue -->
    <template>
      <Layout>
        <validation-observer ref="observer">
          <form class="center mb-4 mt-3">
            <h3>Contact us</h3>
            <validation-provider
              v-slot="{ errors }"
              name="Name"
              rules="required|max:10"
            >
              <v-text-field
                v-model="name"
                :counter="10"
                :error-messages="errors"
                label="Name"
                required
              ></v-text-field>
            </validation-provider>
            <validation-provider
              v-slot="{ errors }"
              name="email"
              rules="required|email"
            >
              <v-text-field
                v-model="email"
                :error-messages="errors"
                label="E-mail"
                required
              ></v-text-field>
            </validation-provider>
            <validation-provider v-slot="{ errors }" name="select" rules="required">
              <v-select
                v-model="select"
                :items="items"
                :error-messages="errors"
                label="Query type"
                data-vv-name="select"
                required
              ></v-select>
            </validation-provider>
            <v-textarea
              outlined
              name="input-7-4"
              label="What problem do you have"
              value="Tell us more about the problem"
            ></v-textarea>
            <v-textarea
              outlined
              name="input-7-4"
              label="What's your business like"
              value="Tell us more about your business"
            ></v-textarea>
            <v-btn class="mr-4" @click="submit"> Send </v-btn>
            <v-btn @click="clear"> Clear </v-btn>
          </form>
        </validation-observer>
        <div class="separator"></div>
      </Layout>
    </template>
    <script>
    import { required, email, max } from "vee-validate/dist/rules";
    import {
      extend,
      ValidationObserver,
      ValidationProvider,
      setInteractionMode,
    } from "vee-validate";
    setInteractionMode("eager");
    extend("required", {
      ...required,
      message: "{_field_} can not be empty",
    });
    extend("max", {
      ...max,
      message: "{_field_} may not be greater than {length} characters",
    });
    extend("email", {
      ...email,
      message: "Email must be valid",
    });
    export default {
      components: {
        ValidationProvider,
        ValidationObserver,
      },
      data: () => ({
        name: "",
        email: "",
        select: null,
        errors: null,
        items: ["Orders", "Delivery", "Tech support", "Refund"],
        checkbox: null,
      }),
      methods: {
        submit() {
          this.$refs.observer.validate();
        },
        clear() {
          this.name = "";
          this.email = "";
          this.select = null;
          this.checkbox = null;
          this.$refs.observer.reset();
        },
      },
    };
    </script>
    <style>
    
    </style>

We have created a form with fields for the customer's name, email, and query type. We also added text area's for the user to provide more detailed information about their issues. Of course, these are all examples and should be replaced with whatever content you deem more appropriate for your use case. If you are new to vee-validate, it is a Vue.js based framework that makes it easy to validate form inputs and display errors. You can read more about it here.

At this point, if we test out the navigations on the browser, we should get all the new pages we created showing up in their respective routes.

Conclusion

In this part, we've been able to create single product views with Gridsome templates. We've also been able to set up the /shop and /support navigations with the corresponding pages showing on the browser. We also used vee-validate to handle form input validation on the support page. In the next section, we are going to add cart and checkout functionalities to our Gridsome application so that users can indeed order meals from our restaurant. See you there!