Default values for Vue component props & how to check if a user did not set the prop?

Question

1. How can I set the default value for a component prop in Vue 2? For example, there is a simple movies component that can be used in this way:

Answer 1

This is an old question, but regarding the second part of the question - how can you check if the user set/didn't set a prop?

Inspecting this within the component, we have this.$options.propsData. If the prop is present here, the user has explicitly set it; default values aren't shown.

This is useful in cases where you can't really compare your value to its default, e.g. if the prop is a function.

Answer 2

Vue allows for you to specify a default prop value and type directly, by making props an object (see: https://vuejs.org/guide/components.html#Prop-Validation):

props: {
  year: {
    default: 2016,
    type: Number
  }
}

If the wrong type is passed then it throws an error and logs it in the console, here's the fiddle:

https://jsfiddle.net/cexbqe2q/

Answer 3

Also something important to add here, in order to set default values for arrays and objects we must use the default function for props:

propE: {
      type: Object,
      // Object or array defaults must be returned from
      // a factory function
      default: function () {
        return { message: 'hello' }
      }
    },