Which controller is triggered by widget? - angularjs

I have a small angular application which was written by a third party and I need to rearrange its layout (e.g. move a search form from the main body to the top menu bar).
Is there a way to determine which controller is triggered when a widget is active? Digging through source is OK and I'm doing it right now. However, I'd prefer something along the lines of a debug message
Widget [widget id] triggered [controller id]

Two ways to figure out the controller:
Check the ng-controller directive in the said HTML.
If you are using ng-route, then find the page URL in your code. Controller class can be defined when specifying routes.
Hope this helps.

Related

Cordova - Angular - <select> tag open a new view

I have an Angular/Cordova app and I'm trying to figure out how should I handle the HTML SELECT tag. What I would like to do is to open a new window with all the options in a list, the user picks one and returns with that value.
The problem is when I do that I lose all the data I had in the first screen as I am closing it when I move to the second one.
I am using Angular's UI.ROUTER. One thing, which I am not too convinced to do, is to save all data entered into StateParams, and when I return, place it back.
What would be the best approach?
It really depends on the use case. If you need to be able to "deep link" to the view where a link loads the view with the pop-up active then using ui-router and stateparams makes the most sense. If deep linking isn't a concern and the user must always select something then you can just use a service/factory/value/provider in order to share the data between the controllers during the lifetime of the app.

is it right to do using ui-router to activate menu items. Any advices to help me understand this?

What I did is:
When a menu item is clicked, a action will be done, like deleting a user, sending emails to a group, etc. To this end, for each menu item, I define a ui-router state, and use the state url to activate the state via sref. I thought that a menu action is just a UI component for user to let users to do something, which is just a state of UI.
I was advised that I was using ui-router in a wrong way as a state url can not identify an action. For example, to delete a group of users, the state url can not tell you what group of users have been deleted.
In short, I agree with your manager while being an angular newbie myself. Angular routes are designed for managing different views of your app. I.e. define a route and corresponding view template for each view. If you add application logic into the routes, your application structure gets quickly a mess and difficult to keep clear.
To me it is much more natural that the views are managed by the routes, and each action in each view is handled by the controller of that view. If the actions grow "big", then it is worth refactoring parts of the controller into separate services. If you require some sort of "dynamic HTML" depending on the action, e.g. bootstrap modals are handy for doing that within the current view (see http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/).
E.g. in my current project, I don't actually manually edit the routes at all but let yeoman angular generator to do that for me free of charge - i.e. I instantiate each new view in my dev.env using the following command (more info on this from https://github.com/yeoman/generator-angular)
yo angular:route myNewView
More info on angular philosophy can be read from angular documentation for developers: https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/concepts
You should probably be doing this actions via a method on $scope.
$scope.deleteItem = function (items) {
Service.delete(items);
};
// which is the same as:
$scope.deleteItem = Service.delete;
<a ng-click="deleteItem(item)">Delete This Item</a>
Having it in the URL just seems wrong. I mean what does that look like? www.mysite.com/delete/users?

Do we need multiple controllers to implement routes in angularjs?

There is chance that I might not be able to explain my problem properly. Let me try.
I am developing a single page application using angular. This app basically displays the episodes of an online novel series. There is a navigation bar, which has query menus (Like, latest episode, episode of a particular date, episodes with a particular tag, etc). For each of these queries, i want a separate url.
/latest - should display the latest episode
/tag/:tagname - should return all episodes with that tag.
For all these queries, the resultant view is the same (list of episodes). So I will be using the same partial for all routes.
My question is, Should I actually create a new controller for each query? like, LatestEpisodeController, TagController?
Is there anyway I can use the url to determine what the user wants and run that query from within the same controller?
Ofcourse you can use same controller in routing definition, the question is what is the purpose of that? It will be worse to debug it later, if you have a shared functionality it's better to turn it into a factory or service and then use in controllers.
But the answer is YES, you can use same controllers and implement different behaviour basing on i.e. $location.path()
yes you can use single controller for multiple routing..
you can create different functions in controller and in each function do the according job.
In my case I have created different html page for different url and registered same controller for the html pages and in the html page I have called controller method using ng-init in div portion.
You can use same controller and same views as you wish...
$location can help you to get current path or full url if you want and you can call your service depends on your path...
here I write a little example for you to get the idea
PLUNKER

Updating URL in Angular JS without re-rendering view

I'm building a dashboard system in AngularJS and I'm running into an issue with setting the url via $location.path
In our dashboard, we have a bunch of widgets. Each shows a larger maximized view when you click on it. We are trying to setup deep linking to allow users to link to a dashboard with a widget maximized.
Currently, we have 2 routes that look like /dashboard/:dashboardId and /dashboard/:dashboardId/:maximizedWidgetId
When a user maximizes a widget, we update the url using $location.path, but this is causing the view to re-render. Since we have all of the data, we don't want to reload the whole view, we just want to update the URL. Is there a way to set the url without causing the view to re-render?
HTML5Mode is set to true.
In fact, a view will be rendered everytime you change a url. Thats how $routeProvider works in Angular but you can pass maximizeWidgetId as a querystring which does not re-render a view.
App.config(function($routeProvider) {
$routeProvider.when('/dashboard/:dashboardId', {reloadOnSearch: false});
});
When you click a widget to maximize:
Maximum This Widget
or
$location.search('maximizeWidgetId', 1);
The URL in addressbar would change to http://app.com/dashboard/1?maximizeWidgetId=1
You can even watch when search changes in the URL (from one widget to another)
$scope.$on('$routeUpdate', function(scope, next, current) {
// Minimize the current widget and maximize the new one
});
You can set the reloadOnSearch property of $routeProvider to false.
Possible duplicate question : Can you change a path without reloading the controller in AngularJS?
Regards
For those who need change full path() without controllers reload
Here is plugin: https://github.com/anglibs/angular-location-update
Usage:
$location.update_path('/notes/1');
I realize this is an old question, but since it took me a good day and a half to find the answer, so here goes.
You do not need to convert your path into query strings if you use angular-ui-router.
Currently, due to what may be considered as a bug, setting reloadOnSearch: false on a state will result in being able to change the route without reloading the view. The GitHub user lmessinger was even kind enough to provide a demo of it. You can find the link from his comment linked above.
Basically all you need to do is:
Use ui-router instead of ngRoute
In your states, declare the ones you wish with reloadOnSearch: false
In my app, I have an category listing view, from which you can get to another category using a state like this:
$stateProvider.state('articles.list', {
url: '{categorySlug}',
templateUrl: 'partials/article-list.html',
controller: 'ArticleListCtrl',
reloadOnSearch: false
});
That's it. Hope this helps!
We're using Angular UI Router instead of built-in routes for a similar scenario. It doesn't seem to re-instantiate the controller and re-render the entire view.
How I've implemented it:
(my solution mostly for cases when you need to change whole route, not sub-parts)
I have page with menu (menuPage) and data should not be cleaned on navigation (there is a lot of inputs on each page and user will be very very unhappy if data will disappear accidentally).
turn off $routeProvider
in mainPage controller add two divs with custom directive attribute - each directive contains only 'templateUrl' and 'scope: true'
<div ng-show="tab=='tab_name'" data-tab_name-page></div>
mainPage controller contains lines to simulate routing:
if (!$scope.tab && $location.path()) {
$scope.tab = $location.path().substr(1);
}
$scope.setTab = function(tab) {
$scope.tab = tab;
$location.path('/'+tab);
};
That's all. Little bit ugly to have separate directive for each page, but usage of dynamic templateUrl (as function) in directive provokes re-rendering of page (and loosing data of inputs).
If I understood your question right, you want to,
Maximize the widget when the user is on /dashboard/:dashboardId and he maximizes the widget.
You want the user to have the ability to come back to /dashboard/:dashboardId/:maximizedWidgetId and still see the widget maximized.
You can configure only the first route in the routerConfig and use RouteParams to identify if the maximized widget is passed in the params in the controller of this configured route and maximize the one passed as the param. If the user is maximizing it the first time, share the url to this maximized view with the maximizedWidgetId on the UI.
As long as you use $location(which is just a wrapper over native location object) to update the path it will refresh the view.
I have an idea to use
window.history.replaceState('Object', 'Title', '/new-url');
If you do this and a digest cycle happens it will completely mangle things up. However if you set it back to the correct url that angular expects it's ok. So in theory you could store the correct url that angular expects and reset it just before you know a digest fires.
I've not tested this though.
Below code will let you change url without redirection such as: http://localhost/#/691?foo?bar?blabla
for(var i=0;i<=1000;i++) $routeProvider.when('/'+i, {templateUrl: "tabPages/"+i+".html",reloadOnSearch: false});
But when you change to http://localhost/#/692, you will be redirected.

AngularJS jquery.flot chart directive DOM collision

i'm working with angular js now for about ke 4 months and despite all the "first step failures" like not emphasising the async way anuglar thinks, I'm facing a problem I don't really understand. It's not that easy to describe.
I have a provider which registrates directives within the routeprovider's resolve function - during config phase. To compile programmatically preconfigured directives I create them on the specific controller call of each route. Acutally the directive I'm adressing here is a complex flotchart directive. It retrieves data from a rest api, transformes the retrieved data and prepares different kinds of option setups like proper stacked line charts or simple piecharts. Every single step takes its time, so I introduced promises to be sure that everthing is at it's right place before I finally call something like "$.plot".
So now I have the following situation: Imagine a singlepage app with two tabs. Each tab - like a first class menu item - refers to a new page with a new controller to process and new partials to render. For each page i have beside other directives one of these heavy flotchart directives to render. actually it takes about 5 seconds to render the chart. So we assume that we really start the app from beginning - like pressing F5. Now I enter the first page the first time and within the mentioned 5 seconds I switch tabs to enter the next page. I get to the next page, see different partials, layouts and stuff and a loading chart - but actually the directive of the first page is still bound to its link phase of that heavy flotchart directive (still preparing options for flot and calculating data to output graphically).
My problem is that this link phase actually really ends within a completely different template/route/controller context and gets stuck. It crashes with a console "replace" error from jquery.flot. I think this error means that flot tries to plot into a div which does not exist anymore. But that error occures just when I switch tabs during the link phase of the first page's heavy flot directive. It doesn't happen when the first page's chart is fully rendered and doesn't happen when the first page's directive hasn't entered its link phase (or am i missing something??). I tried placing some console.logs directly BEFORE hitting the jquery "$.plot" - remember only of the first page chart directive to dive into what's acutally happening. And the strange thing is when I manage to switch tabs within these magic 5 seconds, I still get the console log entries from the first page entry although I'm on a different page. And now guess what. That's strange - acutally two directive link phases are running side by side and one of them on a completely different view (or isn't it completely different, because its a singel page app?). Imagine I plot ("render") the chart in exactly the same div id - like $('#flot-chart'). so I have html parts containing id="flot-chart" on the first page AND on the second. when I now switch from the first to the second page (not finishing the first chart) I get the chart from the first page rendered in the #flot-chart div of the second page and like half a second later the actually correct chart rendered in that same div. So actually the link phase of the first page's chart directive ends in a completely different page in a way showing 2 charts consecutively. I know jquery.flot depends on DOM manipulation via jquery and that might be the problem (perhaps THAT'S the only real explanation for my problem), because jquery DOM manipulation is out from the angular way of life.
Or are there other explanations? I acutally solved the problem via $routeChangeStart listening and killing the $.plot process, but are there some hints, suggestions, explanations for that behaviour?
Plunker flot chart directive DOM collision
I have prepared a plunker which shows kind of a similar behaviour. i've delayed the creation of the directive and the directive's async data and option retrieval methods to somehow mock the behaviour of my app. this is non production code but describes simplified the way my problems occure. when you "fast click" the menu item one after the other many times, you can sometimes force angular to show 2 charts in one page. acutally one directive is linking and doing stuff in a different partial ? i know i'm missing something in my mind ... please give me a hint.
i used chrome for reproducing the error. stop the the plunker and press 'run'. directly after pressing 'run' click as fast as you can both links a couple of times.
Thanks a lot!

Resources