php - How can I integrate Fancybox in Laravel Nova for an image gallery? - Stack Overflow

I'm building a Laravel Nova project and would like to integrate Fancybox to display an image gallery with lightbox and slider functionality. I have a field (stored as a JSON array of image paths) that I want to render as clickable thumbnails. When clicked, the thumbnails should open in a Fancybox modal with navigation (slider) support.

I plan to load Fancybox’s assets (CSS and JS) via Nova’s asset-loading methods (using Nova::style and Nova::script) and initialize Fancybox using a custom JavaScript file. My expectation is that the images will open in a modal lightbox with slider functionality instead of simply navigating to the image URL.

What I Tried:

Loading the Assets in NovaServiceProvider: In my app/Providers/NovaServiceProvider.php, I load Fancybox (and jQuery, since Fancybox 3 depends on it) as follows:

use Laravel\Nova\Nova;
use Laravel\Nova\Events\ServingNova;

public function boot()
{
    parent::boot();

    Nova::serving(function (ServingNova $event) {
        // Load Fancybox CSS
        Nova::style('fancybox', '.5.7/jquery.fancybox.min.css');
        
        // Load jQuery first (Fancybox depends on it)
        Nova::script('jquery', '.6.0/jquery.min.js');

        // Load Fancybox JS
        Nova::script('fancybox', '.5.7/jquery.fancybox.min.js');

        // Load custom initialization script
        Nova::script('fancybox-init', asset('js/fancybox-init.js'));
    });
}

Initializing Fancybox in a Custom Script: I created a file at public/js/fancybox-init.js with the following content to bind Fancybox to elements with a data-fancybox attribute:

$(document).ready(function() {
    // Bind Fancybox to any element with the data-fancybox attribute
    $('[data-fancybox]').fancybox({
        loop: true, // Enable looping of gallery images
        // You can add additional options here
    });
});

Rendering the Gallery in a Nova Resource: In one of my Nova resources, I output a gallery using a Text field that decodes a JSON array of image paths:

use Laravel\Nova\Fields\Text;

Text::make('Images', 'image')
    ->displayUsing(function ($value) {
        $images = json_decode($value, true);
        if (empty($images)) {
            return 'No images available';
        }
        
        $html = '<div class="gallery" style="display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;">';
        foreach ($images as $image) {
            $url = asset($image);
            $html .= '<a data-fancybox="gallery" href="' . $url . '" style="margin: 2px;">';
            $html .= '<img src="' . $url . '" alt="Image" style="width: 50px; height: auto;" />';
            $html .= '</a>';
        }
        $html .= '</div>';
        return $html;
    })
    ->asHtml();

I expected that clicking any thumbnail in the Nova resource would trigger Fancybox to intercept the click event, opening the image in a modal lightbox with slider navigation. Instead, I’m not sure if the integration is working as intended or if there are any Nova-specific considerations (such as dynamically loaded content or asset caching) that I need to address.