Ability to extend the Stimulus Application class

Summary

Class inheritance provides a way to achieve custom behaviour and it would be great to also allow this at the Application level.

Currently, it is not easy to extend and use the Application class without rewriting its static start method.

Details

In the Application code, the start static method references the Application class directly instead of using this.

https://github.com/hotwired/stimulus/blob/f690a6a2e856a35ebdb78246285b734da541338e/src/core/application.ts#L19-L23

This means that even if you extend the Application with say a custom method override of load, this custom method will never get used.

Proposal

Using this instead of Application should solve the issue.

  static start(element?: Element, schema?: Schema): Application {
    const application = new this(element, schema)
    application.start()
    return application
  }

Use case

A trivial use case to add extra behaviour to the application stop call.

class MyApplication extends Application {
  stop() {
    super();
    console.log('application stopped');
  }
}

const application= MyApplication.start();
application.stop();

[lb-]

Thanks. I still have this on my radar and hope to get a PR up when I get the chance.

[lb-]

PR up https://github.com/hotwired/stimulus/pull/603