Using v-if and v-show directives is probably the most popular way to hide or show a component. These directives in Vue actually gains more popularity as it is missing in React. While you can of course toggle display between components or some tab content using v-if or v-show, Vue.js actually provides in-built and better ways to do it properly. You can do so by using the v-bind:is directive.

I’m going to show how that works by creating three tab contents named about, profile and photos. I’ll name these components about-tab, profile-tab and photos-tab respectively. Here’s my main.js file doing the same:

import Vue from "vue";
import App from "./App.vue";

Vue.config.productionTip = false;

Vue.component("about-tab", {
  template: "<div>About me</div>"
});

Vue.component("profile-tab", {
  template: "<div>My profile</div>"
});

Vue.component("photos-tab", {
  template: "<div>My photos</div>"
});

new Vue({
  render: (h) => h(App)
}).$mount("#app");

Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

And here’s my App.vue file using these components on demand:

<template>
  <div id="app">
    <button @click="selectedTab = 'About'">About</button>
    <button @click="selectedTab = 'Profile'">Profile</button>
    <button @click="selectedTab = 'Photos'">Photos</button>

    <div class="tab-content">
      <component v-bind:is="selectedTabComponent"></component>
    </div>
    <div class="np-credits">wwww.nightprogrammer.com</div>
  </div>
</template>

<script>
export default {
  name: "App",
  data() {
    return {
      selectedTab: "about",
    };
  },
  computed: {
    selectedTabComponent() {
      return `${this.selectedTab.toLowerCase()}-tab`;
    },
  },
};
</script>

<style>
#app {
  font-family: "Avenir", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
  padding: 24px;
}

button {
  background-color: #004cbe;
  color: #ffffff;
  border: 0px;
  border-radius: 6px;
  padding: 6px 20px;
  margin-right: 1em;
  cursor: pointer;
  transition: all 0.3s;
}

button:hover {
  background-color: #2f79e7;
  transition: all 0.3s;
}

.tab-content {
  margin-top: 20px;
  background: #eee;
  padding: 12px;
  border-radius: 4px;
}

.np-credits {
  font-size: 12px;
  margin-top: 12px;
  color: #4b4b4b;
}
</style>
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

As you can see in the above file, I’ve placed three buttons, each of which would update the selectedTab property. The selectedTabComponent computed property would then attach a -tab to the component name. So, for ‘About’, it’d get changed to ‘about-tab’. The component then get’s activated using the v-bind:is=”about-tab” as shown on line number 8. The component on line 8 is used to dynamically show a component. Just as we did right now.

The above code when compiled would produce the following output:

You can find a working demo of the above code from my repo links below:

Codesandbox / Demo | Github