EDIT: There’s a project in Github listing all API replacements now: the karibu-migration. I’m keeping this blogpost for historic reasons only.

When migrating from Vaadin 8 to Vaadin 14, there is a good basic Vaadin Documentation on Upgrading from Vaadin 8. The documentation also lists replacement components to use in Vaadin 14, but the page doesn’t mention replacement APIs to use. So, here we go.

Component

Component.setCaption() is no longer available. There is no direct replacement for Vaadin 14; certain components do have setLabel() but not all have it, and there is no unifying interface HasLabel. See and vote for issue 956.

Workaround is to use the following functions:

public class UIUtils {
  public static void setLabel(Component component, @Nullable String label) {
    if (component instanceof Checkbox) {
      ((Checkbox) component).setLabel(label);
    } else {
      component.getElement().setProperty("label", label);
    }
  }

  @Nullable
  public static String getLabel(Component component) {
    if (component instanceof Checkbox) {
      return ((Checkbox) component).getLabel();
    } else {
      return component.getElement().getProperty("label");
    }
  }
}

Component.setTooltip() is no longer available and there is no direct replacement for Vaadin 14. For simple tooltips you can take advantage of the title attribute or alternatively use the Tooltip extension.

public class UIUtils {
  public static void setTooltip(Component component, String description) {
    component.getElement().setAttribute("title", description);
  }

  public static String getTooltip(Component component) {
    return Strings.nullToEmpty(component.getElement().getAttribute("title"));
  }
}

UI

The UI.getUiRootPath() is no longer available. It prints the context root with the leading slash, e.g. /Gradle___karibu_helloworld_application_war and so it’s perfect for creating navigational links. A direct replacement for that is VaadinRequest.getCurrent().getContextPath() which can be called anytime and will always return /Gradle___karibu_helloworld_application_war (it will omit the current route path and any query parameters).

More

For more utility methods please see the karibu-tools project.