Migrating to Aurelia 2

Aurelia 2 is a complete rewrite of Aurelia that shares many of the same loved and familiar features of Aurelia 1. Understandably, in the spirit of progress, not everything is the same. In this section, we are going to guide you through what has changed and how you can migrate over your Aurelia 1 applications to Aurelia 2.

COMPAT PACKAGE

An quickest way to get an application in v1 up an running in v2 is to include the compat package. It can be done via 2 steps:

1. installing the compat package via

npm install @aurelia/compat-v1

1. include the compat package into your app:

import { compatRegistration } from '@aurelia/compat-v1';

...
Aurelia
  .register(compatRegistration, ...)
  .app(...)
  .start()

BREAKING CHANGES

Scope selection

In v2, when trying to bind with a non-existent property, the closest boundary scope will be selected, instead of the immediate scope of the binding (v1 behavior).

Internal binding property observeProperty has been renamed to observe

In v1, if you happen to use .observeProperty method from bindings in your application/library, then change it to observe instead. The parameters of the signature remain the same.

Internal binding property sourceExpression has been renamed to ast

In v1, if you happen to use .sourceExpression property from bindings in your application/library, then change it to ast instead. The type of the property remains the same.

Enhance API changes:

In v1, enhance method on an Aurelia instance has the signature:

class Aurelia {
  ...

  enhance(elementOrConfig: Element | IEnhancementConfig): View;
}

In v2, enhance method on an Aurelia instance has the signature:

interface IAurelia {
  ...

  enhance(enhancementConfig: IEnhancementConfig): IEnhancedView;
}

Parent container and resources can be specified through this config.

Call binding (some-prop.call="...")

The call binding no longer assigns properties of the first argument pass to the call to the calling override context. This is unreasonably dynamic and could result in hard-to-understand templates.

In Aurelia 1, you would have used call bindings like this:

export class MyElement {
  onChange;

  onInternalButtonClick() {
    this.onChange({ value: this.value });
  }
}

<my-element on-change.call="propertyChanged(value)">

In Aurelia 2, the property name is now on the $event property passed to the callback. It's a minor change, but you now do this instead:

<my-element on-change.call="propertyChanged($event.value)">

If attribute (if.bind="...")

• The primary property of If has been renamed from condition to value. If you are using if.bind, you are not affected. If you are using the multi prop binding syntax, the template looks like this:

<div if="condition.bind: yes">

Change it to:

<div if="value.bind: yes">

Binding Engine

• BindingEngine has been removed in v2, but can still be imported from @aurelia/compat-v1 package for ease of migration. The collectionObserver method on the compat package of BindingEngine is not the same with v1, per the follow comparison: v2

  collectionObserver(collection): { subscribe: (callback: (collection, indexMap)) => { dispose(): void } }

  v1

  collectionObserver(collection): { subscribe: (callback: (collection, splices)) => { dispose(): void } }

Binding commands

• .delegate command has been removed, use .trigger instead. With shadow DOM, even though .delegate works, it doesn't feel as natural as .trigger, and the performance benefits .delegate command used to give when browsers were slow adding many event listeners is no longer as big.

• .call command has been removed, use lambda functions instead to create function that preserves the this context. Refer to lambda expression

Compose

• <compose> has been renamed to <au-compose>. The bindable properties of this component have also been changed:

  • viewModel -> component

  • view -> template

  • model remains the same

• Examples migration fix:

  v1:
  <compose view.bind="...">
  <compose view-model.bind="...">
  
  v2:
  <au-compose template.bind="...">
  <au-compose component.bind="...">

  Read more about dynamic composition in v2 in this dynamic composition doc and dynamic ui composition doc.

General changes

• Templates no longer need to have <template> tags as the start and ending tags. Templates can be pure HTML with enhanced Aurelia markup but <template> doesn't need to be explicitly defined.

• PLATFORM.moduleName is gone. This was to address a limitation in Aurelia 1. Aurelia 2 now works well with all bundlers and does not require the addition of this code to use code splitting or tell the bundler where template code is.

• Better intellisense support for TypeScript applications. Using the new injection interfaces, you can now inject strongly typed Aurelia packages such as Fetch Client, Router or Internationalization. These packages are prefixed with an "I" such as IHttpClient, IRouter and so on.

Plugins:

Web-Components plugin

• Remove automatic au- prefix

• Remove auto-conversion of Aurelia element -> WC element. Applications need to explicitly define this. This should make mix-matching & controlling things easier.