Vue v-for Tutorial

Feb 7, 2020

The v-for directive is the right way to do list rendering in Vue. If your Vue instance has an array in data, you can render each element in the array using v-for:

const app = new Vue({
  data: () => ({ people: ['Axl Rose', 'Slash', 'Izzy Stradlin'] }),
  // 1 `<li>` for each person in `people`
  template: `
    <div>
      <h1>Band Members</h1>
      <ul>
        <li v-for="person in people">
          {{person}}
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>
  `
});

Vue also handles array change detection. If you were to remove an element from the array using splice(), Vue would remove an <li> from the DOM for you.

// Remove "Izzy Stradlin" from the array, and also from the `<ul>`
this.array.splice(2, 1);

With v-model

Although you can loop over an array of strings using v-for, it won't work with v-model. The v-model directive won't be able to update your array with any changes to the <input>.

  const app = new Vue({
    data: () => ({ people: ['Axl Rose', 'Slash', 'Izzy Stradlin'] }),
    // 1 `<input>` for each person in `people`
    template: `
      <div>
        <h1>Band Members</h1>
        <div id="people-array">{{people}}</div>
        <ul>
          <li v-for="person in people">
            <input v-model="person">
            <span>{{person}}</span>
          </li>
        </ul>
      </div>
    `
  });
Even though the `input` is updated, the array doesn't change!

The way to work around this is to use an array of objects with v-for. Whenever you use v-model with v-for, make sure the property you're binding with v-model is an object property.

  const app = new Vue({
    data: () => ({
      people: [
        { name: 'Axl Rose' },
        { name: 'Slash' },
        { name: 'Izzy Stradlin' }
      ]
    }),
    template: `
      <div>
        <h1>Band Members</h1>
        <div id="people-array">{{people}}</div>
        <ul>
          <li v-for="person in people">
            <input v-model="person.name">
            <span>{{person.name}}</span>
          </li>
        </ul>
      </div>
    `
  });

With Objects

You can also use v-for to loop over the keys of an object using the v-for="(value, key) in obj" syntax. Note that v-for only loops over own properties.

const app = new Vue({
  data: () => ({
    people: {
      singer: 'Axl Rose',
      guitarist: 'Slash',
      bassist: 'Duff McKagan'
    }
  }),
  // 3 `<li>` elements: "Axl Rose - singer", "Slash - guitarist",
  // and "Duff McKagan - bassist"
  template: `
    <div>
      <h1>Band Members</h1>
      <ul>
        <li v-for="(value, key) in people">
          {{value}} - {{key}}
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>
  `
});

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