Awesome!

I’d recommend this section of the docs. Also, at the risk of going too far, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice by using Surface while you’re getting started with and familiar with LiveView. I think Surface is awesome, but especially with LiveView 0.18+, much of the gap has been closed, and it will be much easier to find solutions/understand what’s going on if you don’t have to look in two places.

For instance, I think the Surface automatically delegates handle_event to live components, e.g.

# When using Surface
use Surface.LiveComponent

def render(assigns) do
  ~F"""
  <button :on-click="some_event">Button</button>
  """
end

def handle_event("some_event", _, socket) do
  ...
end

# When using LiveView
use Phoenix.LiveComponent

def render(assigns) do
  ~H"""
  <button phx-click="some_event" phx-target={@myself}>Button</button>
  """
end

def handle_event("some_event", _, socket) do
  ...
end

Notice that in the Phoenix.LiveComponent version, you have to explicitly target @myself for the event to go to the live component and not the parent live view. I believe Surface does that delegation automatically, but it obviously can’t delegate send(self(), ...) because it doesn’t have that level of control.

I’m not sure about other examples out there but here is how I would approach just a simple countdown using erlang’s :timer

defmodule MyAppWeb.ExampleLive do
  use MyAppWeb, :live_view

  def mount(_params, _session, socket) do
    if connected?(socket), do: :timer.send_interval(1000, self(), :tick)

    {:ok, assign(socket, %{count: 60})}
  end

  def handle_info(:tick, socket) do
    {:noreply, assign(socket, count: socket.assigns.count - 1)}
  end

  def render(assigns) do
    ~H"""
    <div><%= @count %></div>
    """
  end
end

Calling :timer.send_interval will send a message to the liveview process (i.e. itself) that can then be handled to decrement the current count. The count variable will be available in socket.assigns.count to use elsewhere or to add some logic when the timer reaches zero etc.

this minimal example works for me, ie getting these warnings of unhandled msgs and responding to GET with “test”.

debug] warning: undefined handle_info in ToolPocWeb.ToolLive. Unhandled message: :tick 

defmodule TestWeb.TestLive do
  use TestWeb, :live_view

  def mount(_, _, socket) do
    if connected?(socket), do: :timer.send_interval(1000, self(), :tick)
    {:ok, socket}
  end

  def render(assigns) do
    ~H"""
    test
    """
  end
end