Use Angular Ui-router without any views or templates - angularjs

I've used UI router in the past in single page applications and found it prefect for loading new views and syncing them with the URL. However, I now have a normal multi-page ecommerce site which uses Angular a lot on various pages. Including te search results page.
I need to use ui-router only on this page to do ajax paging. Basically the content is already loaded onto the page and I have an ng-repeat for the results. It's a very simple set up.
What I want to do is change the state/url when the user hits the next/previous buttons and watch the stateParams to look for the new page number, then manually reload the new results and re-bind the ng-repeat to show the new results. Obviously I could load new search results without using ui-router at all but I want the back button to work so that you can go back through the pages.
Now, as far as I can see none of this requires any ui-view tags, or templates or controllers. I simply want to update the URL when a button is clicked and watch for changes. Is this possible with UI-router and if it is then what routes (if any) do I put into $stateProvider config?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Related

To ui-router or to not ui-router

I'm making a wizard which will help user in creating an item. It's a form with input boxes and dropdowns and a Next button. I'm not sure if it's proper to use ui-router to display next page when Next button is clicked. For now, I'm planning to use ui-router to display succeeding next pages.
How are you going to display the next page if you don't want to use ui-router?
you can use ui-router or normal route provided by angular,ui-router comes with extra and powerful functionality like states and nested viees and all.
Go through this link for more info
What is the difference between angular-route and angular-ui-router?

Loading controllers when navigating through screens

I'm currently using directives in my ionic app, there directives are normally bind to a angular controller. So my problem is, when I navigate through the app, my controllers are not loading (loads for the first time) and hence I cannot setup some initial values.
Following is an example
I navigate to users screen/page
users controller loads (When I check with Chrome dev tools)
I navigate to home screen
I navigate back to users screen
At this point I expect users controller to load again, to setup my initial values, but it's not happening
I'm not sure if this is the default behavior, or am I missing something?
if you are using nested states, parent.child1, parent.child2, parent only loads 1 for the entire hierarchy, changing from child1 to child 2 will not reload the parent controller, thats one of the pros of using ui-router.
also note that with ionic latest version they introduced view caching so, the controller is only instanciated once for each view, to prevent that you need to use
cache-view="false"
in your ion-view
http://ionicframework.com/docs/api/directive/ionNavView/

Loading views with angularJS

I saw in many websites like twitter.com when you navigate between views by clicking navigation bar menus, then views loaded only one time and the loading spinner appear only for the first time the view has been loaded. If you back to the view again,it loaded directly and the loading spinner does not appear again.
I wonder, how can i do something like that using AngularJS ?. I need any tutorials to help me doing this or put me on the road.
This is already a core part of angular. Have a read of the $templateCache documentation. Here is a simple excerpt:
The first time a template is used, it is loaded in the template cache for quick retrieval. You can load templates directly into the cache in a script tag, or by consuming the $templateCache service directly.
So when using something like ng-include to grab a remote template via a file, it will only be loaded once, and automatically placed into this cache and reused when necessary.
If instead you are wondering how you go about only reloading part of the page, then you need to look at ng-view (which is part of the basic route module), or ui-router for more complex hierarchical view layouts.

Angular UI Router - How to preserve views while switching views

I am I new to Angular and UI Router.
Plunk http://plnkr.co/edit/1wfyrGryfGG5RtXozPFY?p=preview
Setup I have three top level application nav buttons Home, Projects, Help. They load different views home.html, projects.html and help.html using the Angular UI Router ui-view directive. This works good.
The Projects.html view has a tab bar with each tab corresponding to a project: D1, D2 D3 etc., I show the corresponding project tab using url router attributes.
Every time I click the Projects button it is reloading the tab bar completely. I loswe the current tab and hopefully if any nested views inside it. Basically the page contents of Project.html, invoking the controller as well.
I read through the wiki documents and couldnt figure out how to implement my required functionality. I am sure I am missing something. Will it always reload the view?
Question: How to avoid reloading the projects view contents so that I can retain the selected tab and all the contents as-is before switching to Home. Because I would have a lot of nested views and models on each project.
I wanted similar functionality too, but ui-router doesn't yet support it. I forked ui-router to support "parallel states" and submitted it to the project for comment. The gist of the conversation is that ui-router will eventually support some form of parallel states but not yet. In the meantime, you can try my fork of 0.2.10 which provides the parallel states that you want.
Read the conversation here: https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router/issues/894
View the sample parallel tabs plunk here: http://plnkr.co/edit/YhQyPV?p=preview
Here is the fork; build it with grunt: https://github.com/christopherthielen/ui-router
One option would be to implement a service that can be used to maintain the previous state. Services persist over controller changes, thus they can be used to maintain the previous page state and updated when the route changes. something similar to this would work.
app.factory('persitDataService', [function(currentStateData){
var stateService = {
state:{
//your object data set to passed in data
}
//other functions here
};
return stateService
});
then in the controllers just inject the service and assign to a scope value. When the route changes just reset the data in service to new state and inject into new controller
This should work for the previous page state. If you are wanting to save the states of all previous pages then this becomes a larger problem but should be accomplished in much the same way only with a more complicated service setup.
This could also be combined with local and session storage

How to preserve state of hidden views?

I'm an Angular newbie working on a Phonegap application with a few views: a map, a list, and search.
As the user interacts, each view accumulates some UI state: the map is dragged, the list gets a scroll position, a detail view is opened for a list item, a search is performed, etc. I'd like for the user to be able to navigate among views without losing this state.
When I put my views in partials in ng-view, and my nav links use href="#/path", or ng-click to trigger location.path(path), the controller is run and state is obliterated. Makes sense.
One option would be to ng-include all partials in index.html and ng-show based on the user's nav actions. However, I've found that this kind of complexity in the DOM will lead to poor Phonegap performance. It also feels that by eschewing routing, I'm losing one of the main benefits of using Angular.
Another thought: nav clicks cause traversal of browser history. Seems tricky to maintain the state of all views in parallel, however.
My question: is there a good pattern for this?
FWIW currently using Phonegap 3.0 and Angular 1.1.5. Thanks for your time.
If you want to preserve the state of the DOM in parallel views, there's an extension to ui-router called ui-router-extras. It has a a nice demo with state transitions and full DOM preservation when switching among tabs.
you can keep all the data that needs to persist between controller reloads in services
a simple example here
Preserve state with Angular UI-Router
a more complex example here that includes restoring state if the user leaves the page and then presses the back button
Maintain model of scope when changing between views in AngularJS

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