Is possible to avoid setting a key when static attributes are used?

[blikblum]

The use case is:

I must patch an existing element which should be root node of render function

To do this i use idom.patchOuter

But when a key is used to create this root element idom will create another element discarding the element being patched.

See https://codepen.io/blikblum/pen/GmzVBz (to get the error behavior add a key to root div element)

[davidjamesstone]

Sorry it's taken a while to get back to you.

There doesn't seem to be a way to avoid setting a key when statics are used.

You can force a value for the key to use key` attribute to override:

<div key="foo"><div>

Could that help?

[blikblum]

I need the key to be empty (no key). Tried <div key=""><div> but it still creates a random key. I can create a PR to not create key when key=""

[davidjamesstone]

I'm not sure I would want to encourage this by having the capabilty to unset a key tbh. Elements with statics but without a key can result in adjacent element getting out of sync and the idom patch doesn't work as expected.

I haven't worked with patchOuter much. Maybe I need to look into it first.

[blikblum]

One possibility is not generating statics attributes when key="" or when having an specific attribute e.g. <div nostatics href="xx"><div>. Since this is opt-in would not have backward issue.

My use case is to allow create templates with the root element defined in the template body. This is a requested feature for MarionetteJS .

Technically i could implement with patchOuter but the issue outlined in first post prevents doing so.