Why is my angular grid so slow? - angularjs

So, I have made some custom directive which draws kind of a data-grid, based on floated divs (because nested flex implementation in FF sucks - but it's not the point).
How it works :
I pass some data collection to the directive via something like <the-grid data-list="parentController.displayedRows">
Inside this first directive, I have columns via something like <a-grid-column data-value="row.value"></a-grid-column> with many attributes I won't precise here.
The data-value value can be a direct expression, bound to the row on which the the-grid directive controller is ng-repeating in order to display each columns, or a function which have to be $eval-uated in order to display the intended value from the parentController.
In my <the-grid> directive controller, I have the rendering template of my grid which make a nested ng-repeat div (first one on the rows of the data-collection, second one on the columns, created in the directive), it looks like :
<div data-ng-repeat="row in list">
<div data-ng-repeat="cell in theGridColumns"
data-ng-bind-html="renderCell(row, cell)">
</div>
</div>
I have some keyboard nav in order to quickly select a row or navigate within pagination or many tabs, which does nothing more than applying some class on the selected row, in addition to update some "selectedRowIndex".
I'm using angular-vs-repeat in order to have the minimum of row divs in my DOM (because the app is running on slow computers). This works well.
The problem is that every time I'm hitting some "up" or "down" key on my keyboard, Angular is "redrawing" EVERY cells of the list.
So, let's suppose I've 200 rows in my data list, and 7 columns for each rows. First load of the page, it passes ~3000 times in the renderCell() function. Ok , let's accept that (don't really understand why, but ok).
I hit the down key in order to go to the second line of my list. It passes ~1100 times in the renderCell() function.
So yes, the result is very slow (imagine if I let the down arrow key pressed in order to quick navigate within my rows)... I can't accept that. If someone could explain that to me... Any help would be greatly accepted :)
If I make the same thing without a directive (direct DOM manipulation, with columns made by hand and not in a ng-repeat within a ng-repeat), every thing is smooth and clean.
Yes, I've look into every angular grid on the market. No one is satisfying me for my purpose, that's why I've decided to create my own one.
And no, I really can't give you some JSFiddle or anything for the moment. The whole app is really tentacular, isolating this is some kind of complicated).

Try to use bind once (angular 1.3+)
<div data-ng-repeat="row in ::list">
<div data-ng-repeat="cell in ::theGridColumns"
data-ng-bind-html="::(renderCell(row, cell))">
</div>
</div>

Related

Add attributes to elements in ng-repeat

I have a
<div ng-repeat="post in getServerPosts()" >
where i ng-bind post.title and post.excerpt. Posts also have unique a post.id but it is not shown (which is what I want since I don't bind it).
I am trying to find a way to allow the user to mark a post by somehow utilizing the post.id. That way, if a user marks a post it will automatically be marked next time the ng-repeat runs (every time the page loads).
I have played around with scopes in the controller but I can't figure out how to handle the post.id this way.
Question is probably beyond newbie level and maybe there are smarter ways to do this. Any hint or advice?

How should I integrate my directive and scope object in the view?

In my controller I have an array of objects. The object is called Well has a few properties, one of which is Location, which stores a string like "A1", "B4", "B13", etc. The location indicates a position on a grid. The letter represents the row, and the number represents the column.
Now that I have this nice list of objects, I would like to display them all on a grid in my view. When I say grid, I mean that loosely. The grid I have come up with is a series of divs, each with an id equal to a location name.
I have created a directive called tile that will display the properties of a single object. The directive looks like so:
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-3" ng-repeat="well in wellArray">
<ul><li ng-repeat="prop in well">{{ prop }}</li></ul>
</div>
</div>
Great! And then I can create a tile in my view for a specific Well in the list of Well objects like so:
<div tile name="{{my.getName()}}" dil="{{my.getDilution()}}"></div>
If this list of objects was ordered by the location property, I could simply turn it into an array of arrays, one array for each row, and then use a double ng-repeat in my view. Unfortunately they are not in order, and I do not want to create a sorting method given the format that the location property is in. If i were to do the double ng-repeat on this list as it is now, I would end up with a grid of tiles that are in no particular order.
Given my limited exposure to javascript, I thought of using jquery's .append() method.(note: i have referenced jquery before angular, so angular.element() will use the jquery library instead of jqlite so I can use jquery selectors) In my view I created a bunch of divs in the following format:
<div id="A1"></div>
<div id="A2"></div>
etc.
And then in my controller I created a method that attempts to append a single Well which has a location of "A1" to the element on the view that has an id="A1". My code looks like so:
angular.element('#A1').append('<div tile name="{{my.getName()}}" dil ="{{my.getDilution()}}"></div>');
I thought it would append the div with the tile directive, to the div with id="A1", however, it does nothing. In fact, there are no errors at all.
Surely my psuedo jquery approach is not the best way to go about this. Not only is it not working (no idea why, maybe because angular needs to compile something somehow), but it's also not a very Angular approach. I keep reading in tutorials and introductions to "not use jquery at all for the first few weeks" and "90% of the things you'll waste lines of code in jquery, can be done suceinctly in Angular". Someone please lend this poor excuse of a programmer a hand!!
Just following your example in comments with .append, instead of iterating over your array and appending elements to a container element, create a conceptual representation of the data, and then use it in the view.
In controller, do something like the following:
$scope.wellData = {};
for (well in wellArray){
var key = wellArray[well].getLocation();
$scope.wellData[key] = well;
}
Then in the view, do ng-repeat over wellData:
<div id="item.getLocation()" ng-repeat="item in wellData">
<div tile name="{{item .getName()}}" dil="{{item .getDilution()}}"></div>
</div>
You definitely should stay away from jQuery in controllers. Just assume that there is no DOM in controllers whenever you get the urge to do anything related to DOM. Controller deals with ViewModels which are conceptual representation of the view, but it is view-independent. Whenever you break that separation, you make your controllers harder to test, and you make your view more difficult to change. And, by going against MVVM principles, you will keep bumping into issues with AngularJS.

How do I prepend a new item to an ng-repeat list?

I have situations where I need to prepend an item to a list that is initially generated using ng-repeat. How do I do this?
<div ng-click="prependItem()>Click Here</div>
<div ng-repeat="item in items">
<div class="someClass">Item name: {{item.name}}</div>
<div class="anotherClass">Item type: {{item.type}}</div>
</div>
If I click on prependItem() I want want the new item to be added to the top of the list. Obviously, I don't want to regenerate the entire ng-repeat. I've been unable to find any documentation that would explain how to do this. Thank ahead of time for any help!
scope.prependItem = function (newItem) {
items.unshift(newItem);
};
AngularJS is smart enough to know the addition, and only create html element for it
http://plnkr.co/edit/qzIfzSP6buiQ49rDreNk?p=preview
You can see from console that only the newly added item will log messages
ng-repeat will rebuild the list if you add an item to the front of your array. If you add it to the end it's smarter in that it will only update the DOM to reflect the change for the one item you've added in.
Because you've added an item to the front, it has to move everything in the DOM so I think it just rebuilds it as it's easier to do than moving (don't quote me on that though lol). It isn't necessarily a bad thing to rebuild that list (unless it's huge, you won't even notice the refresh, if it is very big, I'd recommend showing a spinner whilst it rebuilds the html, that's the approach we've taken at work; since the user has clicked the button they're expecting the interaction so the spinner seemed like the best compromise whilst angular rerendered).

Why is my Angular JS ng-show empty list div shows up for a split second while API is being called?

<div ng-show="!activities.length">No items in feed</div>
I use the above code to show a message when a user has no items in their feed. On that same page I have a radio button to show different types of feeds (e.g. just yours, or all your friends, etc.). When the user selects a different option, it makes a post back to my API which takes a second, but while the api is grabbing the data the empty list message displays for a second.
Is there an easy way to resolve this?
Use the ngCloack directive for this:
http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngCloak
The other option is to use ng-bind as many people recommend it over ng-cloak:
http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngBind
I personally have had issues where even using ng-cloak there is a slight markup flash.

Stop AngularJS inserting <span class="ng-scope"></span> using ng-include

I'm using the Foundation layout framework, which automatically floats the last sibling of .column to the right and I really appreciate this is a behaviour. However, AngularJS takes it upon itself to insert span.ng-scope after every div.column, which somehow causes browsers to consider the last span the last sibling of .column (even though it is not).
Specifically the css in Foundation responsible for this is:
[class*="column"] + [class*="column"]:last-child { float: right; }
As I understand it, [attribute*="substring"] should select only siblings that match, so, for the above, only elements whose class attribute contains column (including columns). I would think a span tag whose class attribute that does not contain column should not match (and thus be ignored by :last-child). However, this does not seem to be the case.
Regardless, the span is causing the problem:
Angular buggering it up (jsfiddle)
Works fine without Angular (same jsfiddle, no ng-include)
Is there a way to configure angular to stop inserting those span tags? I would, begrudgingly, modify the css selector to somehow ignore all span tags; however I might eventually need/want to use a span tag.
Since you indicated the div can be moved inside, this works:
<ng-include src="'main.tmpl'"></ng-include>
Then in your template:
<div class="row">
<article id="sidepanels" class="four columns">
...
</div>
I'm not aware of any way to prevent angular from inserting the span tags (I think it keeps track of scopes that way -- for garbage collection).
Also you can try my version of include directive that does not creates a scope: Gist source.
As no scopes are created, AngularJS should not create additional element to mainain scope (it actually use data attributes to store link to scope).

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