AngularJS Directives Cookbook

AngularJS Directives Cookbook

Overview of this book

AngularJS directives are at the center of what makes it such an exciting – and important - web development framework. With directives, you can take greater control over HTML elements on your web pages – they ‘direct’ Angular’s HTML compiler to behave in the way you want it to. It makes building modern web applications a much more expressive experience, and allows you to focus more closely on improving the way that user interaction impacts the DOM and the way your app manages data. If you’re already using Angular, you probably recognize the power of directives to transform the way you understand and build your projects – but customizing and creating your own directives to harness AngularJS to its full potential can be more challenging. This cookbook shows you how to do just that – it’s a valuable resource that demonstrates how to use directives at every stage in the workflow. Packed with an extensive range of solutions and tips that AngularJS developers shouldn’t do without, you’ll find out how to make the most of directives. You’ll find recipes demonstrating how to build a number of different user interface components with directives, so you can take complete control over how users interact with your application. You’ll also learn how directives can simplify the way you work by creating reusable directives – by customizing them with Yeoman you can be confident that you’re application has the robust architecture that forms the bedrock of the best user experiences. You’ll also find recipes that will help you learn how to unit test directives, so you can be confident in the reliability and performance of your application. Whether you’re looking for guidance to dive deeper into AngularJS directives, or you want a reliable resource, relevant to today’s web development challenges, AngularJS Directives Cookbook delivers everything you need in an easily accessible way.

AngularJS Directives Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Dealing with Modal and Tabs Directives

Introduction

Using inline HTML templates

Creating a simple modal directive

Loading external templates for best practices

Using the link function

Dealing with tabs without Bootstrap UI directives

Building a Navbar Custom Directive

Introduction

Building a navbar directive

Directory structure for common components

Directive's controller function

Using the data attribute to HTML5 compile

Customizing and Using Bootstrap UI Directives

Introduction

Dealing with modal directives

Creating tab directives

The isolate $scope

Building accordion tab directives

Loading dynamic content

Creating Interactive jQuery UI Directives

Introduction

A simple directive example

Manipulating the DOM with jQuery

The compile and link functions

Creating the jQuery UI draggable directive

Creating the jQuery UI droppable directive

Implementing Custom Directives with Yeoman Generators

Introduction

Creating the baseline app with generator-angm

Generator best practices

How to implement the ngMap directive

Using the Angular-Loading-Bar directive

Implementing the ng-grid directive

Using Directives to Develop Interface Components

Introduction

Creating an Off Canvas menu

Applying custom CSS

Building a shopping cart

Building Directives with Dynamic Templates

Introduction

Using dynamic templates on directives

The compile function

Organizing dynamic directives on shared folders

Mixing different content on templates

Creating Reusable Directives

Introduction

How to scale an AngularJS project to use reusable directives

Building a directive as an interface component

Creating a form directive with custom validation

Directive Unit Testing with Karma and Jasmine

Introduction

How to test AngularJS apps using Karma and Karma Runner

Writing tests for directives with Jasmine

Testing elements when the scope changes

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Loading external templates for best practices

Thinking in terms of best practices, let's see how to use the same modal directive with an external template, using the templateUrl property instead of the template property. Before we go further, let's explore the two ways to use templates.

Use the script tag of ng-template, as shown in the following example:

<body ng-app='SimpleModal'>
  <script type="text/ng-template" id="modal.html">
  <div ng-show='show'>
    <div class='modal-overlay' ng-click='hideModal()'></div>
    <div class='modal-background' ng-style='windowStyle'>
      <div class='modal-close' ng-click='hideModal()'>X</div>
      <div class='modal-content' ng-transclude></div>
    </div>
  </div>
  </script>
</body>

Alternatively, place the HTML content in a separate file; in this case, the template will be an external file, not just external from the directive code. The code is as follows:

<body ng-app='SimpleModal'>
  <div ng-controller='ModalCtrl'>
    <button ng-click='toggleModal()'>Open Modal</button>
    <modal-window show='modalShown' width='400px' height='60%'>
      <p>Hello Simple Modal Window with External Template<p>
    </modal-window>
  </div>
</body>

Both ways have the same result, and we will see the difference later. For now, let's focus on the HTML template.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will be using the same code base as the previous recipe.

How to do it…

Let's replace the entire template string with the following code:

// loading external templates
app = angular.module('SimpleModal', []);

app.directive('modalWindow', function() {
  return {
    restrict: 'E',
    scope: {
      show: '='
    },
    replace: true, // Replace with template
    transclude: true, // To use custom content
    link: function(scope, element, attrs) {

      scope.windowStyle = {};

      if (attrs.width) {
        scope.windowStyle.width = attrs.width;
      }
      if (attrs.height) {
        scope.windowStyle.height = attrs.height;
      }

      scope.hideModal = function() {
        scope.show = false;
      };
    },
    templateUrl: "modal.html"
  };
});

Remember that we keep the same controller code as the previous example. The templateUrl property points to an external file, so place the following code in a blank HTML file and save it as modal.html:

<body ng-app='SimpleModal'>
  <div ng-controller='ModalCtrl'>
    <button ng-click='toggleModal()'>Open Modal</button>
    <modal-window show='modalShown' width='400px' height='60%'>
      <p>Hello Simple Modal Window with External Template<p>
    </modal-window>
  </div>
</body>

How it works…

With the templateUrl property, we can load an external HTML template inside our current HTML file. It is very useful to use this practice because we can reuse the same template in different places in the application. We will cover this topic later on in this book.

Tip

To load external templates inside your files, you must have a HTTP server.

There's more…

When we use type=text/ng-template with the script tag, we need to place the modal content inside our page, and the content will be hidden by the browser. The script tag is used to tell the browser that there is a code snippet, usually in JavaScript. In this way, the content of the tag is interpreted differently by the browser. In our case, the type attribute indicates that we have a template, as we can see in the previous example.

We can use the same example, as shown in the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.3.x/angular.js"></script>
<title>Modal Window Directive</title>
<style>
...
</style>
</head>
<body ng-app='SimpleModal'>
  <script type="text/ng-template" id="modal.html">
    <div ng-controller='ModalCtrl'>
      <button ng-click='toggleModal()'>Open Modal</button>
      <modal-window show='modalShown' width='400px' height='60%'>
        <p>Hello Simple Modal Window using ng-template<p>
      </modal-window>
    </div>
  </script>
</body>
</html>

AngularJS Directives Cookbook

AngularJS Directives Cookbook

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

AngularJS Directives Cookbook

Loading external templates for best practices

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Tip

There's more…

See also