How to render templates with express? - angularjs

My current setup is as follows:
Starting the server and going to localhost takes me to home.ejs as stated here (in my front end routing):
However, when I go to localhost:3000/posts, the posts template is infact not being injected into my index file (where my ui-view is). Ive been following the mean stack guide from thinkster, but have been making a few changes (not using inline templates)
My question is, how do I setup my routing such that localhost:3000/posts will actually take me to the posts page?

You are dealing with two types of routing, client side and server side. Client side is located in your app.config function in your angular code. That function should be calling html files, which are located in your public directory. These files are not rendered server side via express and they wouldn't not be able to read the ejs format.
Typically with MEAN stack applications, you just render your index file when the user logs in, and from there the Angular router takes over with html files and you handle your routing from there. If you don't want Angular routing, you have to set up your index.js file to render pages as they are called with res.render('posts')
You can change your posts.ejs file into an html file, and just call it via Angular when the user navigates to localhost/#/posts (depending on your version and configuration of Angular).
Your Express server side routing will handle your API calls as you have defined in index.js. In order to call those APIs, you will make GET or POST requests via Angular's $http method, through a service or factory.
Hope that helps, if not, let me know and I can elaborate or provide examples.

To solve this, I used Eric Hartmanns solution. By changing posts.ejs to posts.html, and letting the angular router take over on client side, the page was being rendered. However, when typing in localhost:3000/posts in the address bar, the page wasnt being rendered and the server was being hit for some reason. To get around that I simply made a new get route in express and re-rendered index whenever that route was hit like so:
router.get('/', function(req, res) {
res.render('index');
});

Related

Single Page App on React.js and ZF2. Is it possible?

I'm thinking how to implement a SPA on Zend framework 2 using Reactjs? Haven't seen any tutorial that might help me. So, I was asking if this is possible. How would zf2 will handle the routes?
The routes are handled on the client side (by pushing URLs into browser's history so you can also use browser's back button for navigation)
Simply put, changing a route will not load a whole page from the server.
The server does not even know that your JS app is changing the URL in the browser (imagine you write by hand http://example.com#test while you were already on example.com; that #test thing is a fragment URL and it will never be sent to a server)
Instead, the JS application will respond to (once again, client-side) route changes by rendering a different page or section, and making some ajax calls to the server to fetch or update data.
Now let's see what the server should do:
send the first page (the "single-page") and the assets (CSS, JS) on
the first load
respond to app-originated AJAX API calls once the page is loaded and
the JS app has been started
That's why they call them "single page apps", because they do much of the logic and the presentation in the browser (DOM rendering, routes), and the server merely acts as a data layer, or a backend if you like this word better.

Taking server path into account in angular route

I am enhancing an ASP.NET MVC application with angularJS for selected pages. The primary means of navigating the site is still full page request, but some pages contain angular views and associated controllers for interactivity.
Currently, I achieve this by having something like this in the server side view:
<div ng-controller="ExampleCtrl" ng-include="exampleview.html"></div>
However, I would prefer to not inline controller and template definition like that and handle this through routing instead. However, angular routing only uses the client side of the URL (i.e. the parts after the first #). For various reasons, the page URL should remain http://domain.com/Example/Action instead of http://domain.com/Example/Action/#/example (this is just ugly) or http://domain.com/#/example (this will not work because I actually need the server side view as well).
Is there a way to make angular routing take the whole URL path into account instead of just the client part (and works in IE9)?

what is the difference between hashbang and HTML5 pushState? [duplicate]

I'm asking this because a couple of times now, I've tried to play around with the $locationProvider.html5Mode(true) command along with <base href="/"> and ran into a lot of errors calling the scripts/styles/images for my project. I guess there must be something I am doing wrong, but is there a certain folder structure you should follow so you don't run into these errors? Or is there a specific way that the base href works that I'm not quite understanding?
Recently, I thought I'd try it on a very, very small app. It's effectively a static website, but I want to take advantage of Angular's routing to make sure all of the pages can load instantly. So my structure would be something like this:
my-project
css
images
js
angular
app.js
app.routes.js
mainCtrl.js
views
home.html
about.html
contact.html
index.html
So I know that this folder structure isn't great, but I'll only be using Angular in this project for routing, nothing more, so it fits my needs.
I put into the head <base href="/">, put in body ng-app and ng-controller, and inside the body put a <div ng-view> somewhere too.
I added in the $locationProvider.html5Mode(true) and tried the app out. All of my scripts are then being loaded as http://localhost:8888/script.js which is incorrect. The project is located in a folder so that index.html is located in http://localhost:8888/my-project/index.html. So, it should be loading the scripts from http://localhost:8888/my-project/js/angular/app.js for example.
Is there something that I'm not understanding about the base href? Eventually I may host this app somewhere online, so I want the URLs to scripts etc to all be relevant to the file really. Anyone have any ideas?
Alright, so above the base href tag I would have my CSS styles which would be linked as css/style.css and at the bottom of my body tag I would have my scripts loaded as js/init.js or js/angular/app.js for example. This would try to load it as if the js folder is located directly at localhost:8888/js.
The Angular framework is a Single Page Application (SPA) that is able to run in a browser by essentially tricking the browser into running code snippets rather than make server calls, by making use of the "hash" (#) page anchor. Normally, a URL with a # would jump to a specific anchor point in the page; in the case of Angular or other similar SPA frameworks, the # is redirected to a code segment instead.
Ideally, you would like to not have to reference this # in your page URLs. This is where Html5Mode comes into play. Html5Mode is able to hide the #, by using the HTML5 Push State (aka history API).
When Html5Mode is enabled, the normal links on the page are silently replaced by Angular with event listeners. When these events are triggered, the current page is pushed into the browser history, and the new page is loaded. This gives the illusion that you are navigating to a new page, and even allows for the back button to operate.
This is all fine when you are dealing with links which are clicked from within the running application, but relying on event listeners can't work if you navigate to the page from an external source, where Angular isn't loaded into memory yet. To deal with this, you must be loading your pages from a web server which supports URL rewrites. When the server receives a request for a URL that there isn't a physical page for, it rewrites the URL to load the base HTML page, where Angular can be loaded and take over.
When Angular receives a request for a route which has been rewritten in this manner, it must first determine what the intended route was. This is where the Base HTML Tag comes into play. Angular uses the Base reference to help it to determine which part of the URL is on the server, and which part is a client route. Essentially, where the # in the URL would be if Html5Mode was not enabled.
Unfortunately, Base is an HTML Tag that is used by the browser for more than just Angular. The browser also uses this tag to determine the correct location to load scripts and resources using relative paths from, regardless of the path in the location bar. In general, this isn't a problem if all of the scripts and resources are relative to the location of the Index.html file. When Base is omitted, the browser will load scripts from the apparent base path determined by the current URI. However, once you provide it, the browser will use whatever value you have supplied.
In general, unless you are hosting angular on a sub-page of your site and you want your users to expect something specific in the URL string, you should always control the base on your server, and use Base="/" on the client side.

Passport.js, Express.js, and Angular.js routing: how can they coexist?

I apologize this question turned out a bit long, but I have worked on this for some time and really needed to explain all the story.
Background: App based on MEAN stack, trying to authorize Facebook logins using Passport.js.
Following Passport.js guide I implemented something similar to:
// HTML
Add a Facebook login
// send to facebook to do the authentication
app.get('/connect/facebook',isLoggedIn, passport.authorize('facebook',
{ scope : 'email' })
);
// handle the callback after facebook has authorized the user
app.get('/connect/facebook/callback',
passport.authorize('facebook', {
successRedirect : '/profile',
failureRedirect : '/profile'
}));
Notice the target=_self in the html in order to skip Angular routing.
Clearly, authorization works fine. However, redirection does not work, as the routing is handled by Angular. After authorization I never land on /profile (but on the default Angular route).
Therefore, I tried with a custom callback as suggested by Passport.js here, with the hope of passing json data to Angular, and let Angular do the routing. I ended up doing something like:
// In the controller
$http.get("/connect/facebook").success(function(data){
// here I wait for json data from the server and do the routing
});
// I call this route from Angular
app.get('/connect/facebook',isLoggedIn,passport.authorize('facebook',
{ scope : 'email' })
);
// But Facebook lands here!
app.get('/connect/facebook/callback',function(req, res, next) {
passport.authorize('facebook', function(err, user, info) {
res.json({something:smtg});
...
Clearly custom callbacks work for local-login, as Passport.js explains. But here do you see the problem? I call /connect/facebook from Angular, but I should receive some json from /connect/facebook/callback.
I am about to give up Passport, but before this, do you see any solution which would allow landing on /profile after FB authorization, perhaps with a custom message? Many thanks for reading through.
EDIT:
The same question had been reported as an issue on the Passport-Facebook GitHub account. Some additional attempts have been posted there, but not quite the fix yet.
This is a bit more in depth than can be described in one answer, but I'll try to start pointing you in the right direction.
Essentially, Angular.js routes are not really HTML routes at all, but an internal route structure that happens to use the URL for use of the end user. Remember that Angular.js is a client script, and that a full page reload is not desired, as this will reload the entire script. Therefore, /# is used to trick the browser into jumping to a specific bit of code within the already loaded script. (as opposed to the traditional anchor location in the HTML document). Unfortunately (or fortunately), HTML 5 mode allows you to hide the /# part of the url, so instead of seeing http://somesite.com/#/someroute you just see http://somesite.com/someroute. Rest assured, however, that the /# is still there. Angular.js uses the HTML5 pushState (AKA HistoryAPI) to perform the magic replacement.
Given this, if you have called a server route, you are outside the Angular.js script, and any call to load the angular script again will start from the very beginning. You can't actually call your Angular.js route from the server without a full reload. Therefore, you are really doing a double route redirect here. Your server should be calling it's default route for angular, appending /#/someroute to the call. The angular.js page will load, parse off the /#, and redirect to the correct angular route. Keep in mind, however, that if there was any dependency on already loaded objects, those are no longer in memory. Therefore, any route accessed this way should operate as if it is an entry point to your application.
Effectively, you should try using successRedirect : '#/profile', keeping in mind that the profile route in angular should be treated as an app entry point.
Hopefully this gets you started.
If #Claies's way is not working, is it possible you have not get rid of the #= fragment from the facebook callback.
Have a read of this post

What is client-side routing and how is it used?

I will be glad if someone could answer the following questions
How does it work?
Why is it necessary?
What does it improve?
Client side routing is the same as server side routing, but it's ran in the browser.
In a typical web application you have several pages which map into different URLs, and each of the pages has some logic and a template which is then rendered.
Client-side routing simply runs this process in the browser, using JavaScript for the logic and some JS based template engine or other such approaches to render the pages.
Typically it's used in single page applications, where the server-side code is primarily used to provide a RESTful API the client-side code uses via Ajax.
I was trying to build a Single page application and came to know about client side routing.
By implementing client side routing I was able to achieve the following
The front and back buttons in the browser started working for my single page JavaScript application. This was very important while accessing the page from a mobile browser.
The user was able to Bookmark/share a URL which was not possible earlier.
I know that it's late but I have some information about how the client side routing (CSR) works. This answer does not try to provide a full js implementation of client side routing but rather tries to shed some light on what concepts will help you implement one of your own. It's true that when user click an anchor tag, the browser sends a request to the server. But we will be able to intercept the event and prevent it's default behavior, i.e sending a request to the server by using "event.preventDefault();". Below is snippet from React routers web page.
<a
href="/contact"
onClick={event => {
// stop the browser from changing the URL and requesting the new document
event.preventDefault();
// push an entry into the browser history stack and change the URL
window.history.pushState({}, undefined, "/contact");
}}
/>
Also listening to forward/backward button click is important. This can be done by,
window.addEventListener("popstate", () => {
// URL changed!
});
But looking at the above two snippets you can imagine how a CSR could be implemented. There is much more to it. That's why libraries like React Router exists and web frameworks like angular provide CSR by default.
If you want more information please visit the link below, it will take your the concepts page of react router.
https://reactrouter.com/docs/en/v6/getting-started/concepts
Also if you want to get more depth into the topic your could check out the code of Angular router. Comparing the two implementations will give a much more insight.
What :
In react the history object takes care of that what it does..it keeps track of all the addresses and the Router defines all the different routes. So Router takes the help of this History object to keep a track of various addresses / History of the current URL and based on that location it serves the appropriate content.
Why :
To reduce unnecessary reloads.
For better user experience.
It's internally handled by JS.

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