I've angular app with lots of states and modules etc. Now, I want to send a link to the user. When user'll hit this url, I want to redirect him to a new tab rendering only that particular state (specified in URL) i-e I don't want anything else to be visible to the user. Or you can say, I want to open a popup window rendering that particular state's html in popup window . This is the approach that comes to my mind to sort it out.
Ps. There are Rest APIs at the backend which I am calling through angular resource service to bind data with the model of the views
Option
I've rest APIs on backend, So, I was thinking to developing s separate Nodejs application, And I will send nodejs application url to the user and in the default/home route I'll call backend API and, the returned resultset will be rendered in html file within nodeJs application and this way, I'll render the corresponding data to user's browser window.
This is the flow for that
I don't know if that is right or clever approach. Please suggest me what will be the best approach to sort it out.
Thanks in advance.
This is what my app looks like
Everything in the left side-nav is a module and clicking on this I am routing to a different state. I am using angular-material and lots of other dependencies in this project.
And this is what I want.
I'll refer a link to the user for example www.myapp.com/specificpage.html. And hitting this url, a new tab/popup will be opened rendering state defined in the same app but with some non-editable url. And it should like.
There are multiple ways to achieve this and each approach has advantage and disadvantage. You have to choose depending on requirement and architecture. Details are below-
Create a separate app - You can do it through separate code base or use the module based build process and include this module only for new app.
Divide application is two part, public pages and private pages - Include this page and required APIs for this page in the public modules for your app.
Send token in the link - If you want to make secure page, send short lived token in the eMail and validate token on the server before displaying page to the user.
So lets say you have a React-based mobile web app, that takes advantage of server-side rendering for the initial view ( for speed + SEO reasons ). There is no "index.html" file - the index file is dynamically built server-side and returned in the initial response.
Now lets say you want to add PWA functionality to that app. You hook up a service worker to cache assets, etc.
One of the core tenants of PWA's is that they provide an offline experience. Say we just want to show a refresh page, "You're offline, click here to refresh", when the service worker detects the user is offline.
Online examples provided by google talk about using an App Shell -- a static HTML file, which can be cached by the service worker on initial visit, and which will be the "shell" your react app lives inside. This shell ties in to showing an "offline" view.
How does this work with server-side rendering, where there is no "shell" html file, and each route can potentially return a different index.html file?
Any demos or examples of this functionality in the wild?
Any demos or examples of this functionality in the wild?
Yes!
Take a look at https://github.com/GoogleChrome/sw-precache/tree/master/app-shell-demo, which uses the dynamicUrlToDepndencies option in sw-precache to define which underlying resources are used to server-render the App Shell HTML.
The service worker it generates will take care of updating the App Shell HTML whenever any of the resources it depends on changes.
In this model the service worker will return the same App Shell HTML document for all navigation requests, so it assumes that the App Shell HTML is generic enough to then be populated at runtime with the dynamic content that's associated with the actual URL via your standard client-side routing logic.
Take a SaaS company that wants to pack all its services into a single, uhm.. Single Page Application using Angular (1). Now there is a public area (landing page, etc.) and an internal area. There are various layers of protection in the backend. There are different user groups with different privileges.
If the complete app is compiled into a single javascript file, hints for all routes can be found in the JS file quite easily. Then, there are services / $resources for interacting with the API, which again contain quite essential information on the functionality of the application.
Now the question: How could someone put modules on a certain non-binary protection level, and only load this particular module when the user is authorized to see it, all while not reloading the page?
I can find a way to lazily add modules to an angular application. I can also protect single files server sided and only send them to authorized users. But that seems like an unscalable hassle when there are more and more user groups.
Do you know any generic libraries for that purpose, ideally in sync with koa, which do not create a vast overhead? Do you know of some grunt / gulp / whatever processes, which help with that?
Thanks!
You can use latest ui.router which allows you to lazy load routes.
https://ui-router.github.io/ng1/docs/latest/interfaces/state.statedeclaration.html#lazyload
Also you can use web pack and use multiple entry points to create seperate bundles. https://webpack.github.io/docs/multiple-entry-points.html
By following above steps you can optimise the app but I don't think that this will add any protection to the web assets. You can minify to make life bit difficult to understand what your JS code is doing.
I have fully bought into the benefits of using angular and have a a hybrid app (using PhoneGap) I'm going to convert over (from Jquery Mobile) but I'm having a problem figuring out how to get my new code to the app.
The app is currently hosted on our website (NOT local to the device) so normal caching works as expected. I update a web page or js and the app sees the new content (because the underlying webview/browser knows its new content).
But with angular's SPA approach the main module gets loaded up front and changes views based on loading new partials. Also not a problem.
BUT, what happens when I change my app module (the code loaded by ng-app="demo")? Such as adding new routes, controllers, or views.
Since that's already loaded in the browser at bootstrap how do I tell the app there are changes and it needs to reload the overall app?
There are 3 use cases to consider:
1) On a PC/browser you can just refresh the page. I can't depend on users knowing to do that but its not as bad because users are likely to open and close their browser thus reloading the new app/js.
2) When I issue a new PhoneGap app (to the app stores) it forces a browser close/reopen during the installation, so the user will get the new code.
3) THIS IS THE REAL STICKLER. During normal use of the PhoneGap app users may open the app and NEVER close it again (merely suspending and reopening). These are not tech-savvy users and might not even know how to restart an app never mind realize they should try.
So what's the angular way to force the app the refresh when the base app module has changed?
Or am I on my own to create some type of version checking system to force a reload() when I need it.
Seems like a common situation to me but everything I find on caching with angular says something to this effect:
"Since you probably want to maintain browser caching for your views, partials or other routes"
No I don't - I WANT to bust cache for my app/views/controller because i know it has changed.
angular phonegap cache buster
You could dynamically load/unload your controllers on each use. This article should get you started.
I have done a full Single Page Application (SPA) application using Angularjs.
So far so good.
As anyone knows, all javascript files are loaded in the first time access. Or, some file are loaded in lazy mode style when needed.
So far so good...
The situation is: the server updates all files (html partials, javascripts, css's) and the client remain with a lot of files out-dated.
This would be simply solved refreshing the browser, hit F5 key, control+f5, or refresh button in the browser. But this concept does not exists when working with SPA.
I'm not sure how to solve this problem.
I could detect somehow (doing a ping maybe) and just to re-load that specific file. With document.write strategy. But now rises another problem, I have a single javascript file with all javascript minified.
I could try to force a full reload in the browser or force to re-login (and reload because login are SPA part).
But reloading is an ugly solution, imagine the client lose all data in the form because he was unlucky the server have just updated. And worse, I must now create some "auto-save" feature just because of this.
I'm not sure how to handle this, if possible, doing in "angular way".
I wonder how google gmail handles this because I stay logged for many many hours without logging of.
As others have already suggested, keep the logged user on the old version of your webapp.
Not only what you ask is difficult to do in Angular, but it can also lead to a bad user experience and surprising behaviour, since there may not be a mapping between what the user is doing with the old version and what the new version provides. Views may be removed, renamed, split or merged. The behaviour of the same view may have changed, and doing so without notice for the user may cause mistakes.
You made an example with Gmail, but may have noticed that changes to the UI always happen after you logout, never while you're using it.
First of all, if your app is an intranet website used during office time, just update it while nobody is using it. This is a much simpler solution.
Otherwise, if you need to provide 24/24 availability, my suggestion is:
When you deploy the new version of your SPA, keep the old version in parallel with the new version, keep the current users on the old version, and log new users to the new version. This can be made in a number of ways depending on your setup, but it's not difficult to do.
Keep the old version around until you're confident that nobody is still using it or you're pretty sure that the new version is ok and you don't need to rollback to the old version.
The backend services should be backward-compatible with the old version of the frontend. If that's not possible you should keep multiple version of the backend services too.
As the rest of the guys said a solution can be to versioning your files. So every time that your browser check those files out the browser notice that the files are different to the ones that are in the server so the browser cache the new files.
I suggest to use some build tool like gulp, grunt or webpack, the last one is becoming more popular.
By the moment I use gulp for my projects. I´m moving to webpack though.
if you are interested in gulp you can have a look to gulp-rev and gulp-rev-replace plugins.
What do they do?
let´s say that we have the next file in your project app.js what you get after apply gulp-rev to your project is something like app-4j8888dp.js then your html file where the app.js is injected is still pointing to app.js so you need to replace it. To do that you can use gulp-rev-replace plugin.
eg. gulp task where
var gulp = require('gulp');
var rev = require('gulp-rev');
var revReplace = require('gulp-rev-replace');
var useref = require('gulp-useref');
var filter = require('gulp-filter');
var uglify = require('gulp-uglify');
var csso = require('gulp-csso');
gulp.task("index", function() {
var jsFilter = filter("**/*.js", { restore: true });
var cssFilter = filter("**/*.css", { restore: true });
var indexHtmlFilter = filter(['**/*', '!**/index.html'], { restore: true });
return gulp.src("src/index.html")
.pipe(useref()) // Concatenate with gulp-useref
.pipe(jsFilter)
.pipe(uglify()) // Minify any javascript sources
.pipe(jsFilter.restore)
.pipe(cssFilter)
.pipe(csso()) // Minify any CSS sources
.pipe(cssFilter.restore)
.pipe(indexHtmlFilter)
.pipe(rev()) // Rename the concatenated files (but not index.html)
.pipe(indexHtmlFilter.restore)
.pipe(revReplace()) // Substitute in new filenames
.pipe(gulp.dest('public'));
});
if you want to know further details see the links bellow.
https://github.com/sindresorhus/gulp-rev
https://github.com/jamesknelson/gulp-rev-replace
A single page application is that, a single stack that controls the client logic of your application. Thus, any navigation done through the application should be handled by your client, and not by the server. The goal is to have a one single "fat" HTTP request that loads everything you need, and then perform small HTTP requests.
That's why you can only have one ng-app in your apps. You are not suppose to have multiple and just load the modules you need (although the AngularJS team wants to move that way). In all cases, you should serve the same minified file and handle everything from your application.
It seems to me that you are more worried about the state of your application. As Tom Dale (EmberJS) described in the last Cage Match, we should aim to have applications that can reflect the same data between server and client at any point of time. You have many ways to do so, either by cookies, sessions or local storage.
Usually a SPA communicates with a REST based server, and hence perform idempotent operations to your data.
tl;dr You are not supposed to refresh anything from the server (styles or scripts, for instance), just the data that your application is handling. An initial single load is what SPA is all about.
separate your data and logic and reload the data using ajax whenever you want, for that i will suggest you use REST API to get the data from server.
SPA helps you to reduce the HTTP request again and again but its also require some http request to update a new data to view.
Well, you would have to unload the old existing code (i.e. the old AngularJS app, modules, controllers, services and so on). Theoretically, you could create a custom (randomized) app name (with all modules have this prefix for each unique build!) and then rebuild your app in the browser. But seriously.. that's a) very complex and b) will probably fail due memory leaks.
So, my answer is: Don't.
Caching issues
I would personally recommend to name/prefix all resources depended by a build with a unique id; either the build id, a scm hash, the timestamp or whatever like that. So, the url to the javascript is not domain.tld/resources/scripts.js but domain.tld/resources-1234567890/scripts.js which ensures that this path's content will never conflict with a (newer) version. You can choose your path/url like you want (depending on the underlaying structure: it is all virtually, can you remap urls, etcpp). It would be even not required that each version will exist forever (i.e. map all resources-(\d+)/ to resources/; however, this would be not nice for the concept of URLs.
Application state
Well, the question is how often will the application change that it would be important that such reloads are required. How long is the SPA open in a browser? Is it really impossible to support two versions at the same time? The client (the app in the browser) could even send its own version within the HTTP requests.
In the beginning of a new application, there are a lot of changes that would require a reload. But soon after your application has a solid state, the changes will be smaller and would not require a reload. The user itself will make more refreshs.. more than we ever expected :/
As with what everyone else is saying...
Don't, and while socket.io could work it's asking for trouble if you are VERY careful.
You have two options, upon server update invalidate any previous session (I would also give users a half hours notice or 5 minutes depending on application before maintenance would be done.
The second option is versioning. If they are on version 10, then they communicate with backend 10. If you release version 11 and they are still on 10 then they can still communicate with backend 10.
Remember Google wave? It failed for a reason. Too many people writing one source as the same time causes more problems then it solves.
use $state service. create state during loading page using ctor. after specified time re create state and load page.
function(state) {
state.stateCtor(action);
$state.transitionTo(action + '.detail', {}, {
notify: true
});
}
Versioning your files, so on every update increment version number and the browser will update it automaticallly.
My solution consists of several points.
While this is not important, but I send one JavaScript file to the client side, I use grunt to prepare my release. The same grunt file adds to the JavaScript tag a query with version number. Regardless of whether you have one file or lots of files, you need to add a version number to them. You may need to do this for resources as well. (check at the end for an example)
I send back in all my responses from the server (I use node) the version number of the app.
In Angular, when I receive any response, I check the version number against the version number loaded, if it has changed (this means the server code has been updated) then I alert the user that the app is going to reload. I use location.reload(true);
Once reloaded the browser will fetch all new files again because the version number in the script tag is different now, and so it will not get it from cache.
Hope this helps.
<script src="/scripts/spa.min.js?v=0.1.1-1011"></script>