Global value providers in LWC

Drinking the new CoolAid one has to come to terms with the old ways. We had a first glimpse before.

Same but different, reloaded

When developing lightning components using the Aura Framework you could use a series of global value providers that give you access to various data sets: $ContentAsset, $Labels, $Locale, and $Resource.

While this convenient, it pollutes the global name space and it a very proprietary (albeit popular at its time) way to provide information. LWC fixes this in a very standard compliant way. This became possible thanks to the new capabilities in the JavaScript ES6 standard.

In LWC all information provided by Salesforce gets added using ES6 import statements from the @salesforce name space. While that syntax is new to Salesforce developers, it is old news for the rest of JavaScript land. So here you go:

• $ContentAsset -> import assetName from @salesforce/contentAssetUrl/[AssetName]
• $Labels -> import labelName from @salesforce/label/[LabelName]
• $Locale -> import i18nproperty from @salesforce/i18n/[internationalizationProperty] (with various values)
• $Resource -> import resourceName from @salesforce/resourceUrl/[resourceName]
• current User Id -> import userId from @salesforce/User/Id

The @salesforce name space provides access to additional data, like apex and schema.

As usual YMMV