AngularJS: Using directives as templating - angularjs

Question

I'm using a directive to provide a basic template for many of the pages in my Angular app. It looks like this:
angular.module('app.basicLayout', [])
.directive('basicLayout', function () {
return {
restrict: 'E',
transclude: true,
templateUrl: '/assets/views/templates/basicLayout.html'
}
});
And HTML:
<basic-layout>
<h1>My layout goes here</h1>
</basic-layout>
On some of these pages I would like to add a sidebar and still be able to use the layout from my <basic-layout> directive. Is it possible to make something like the following?
<basic-layout>
<h1>My content goes here</h1>
<the-sidebar>
<h2>Sidebar content here</h2>
</the-sidebar>
</basic-layout>
Update
My template file of the directive currently look like this:
<div class="container basic-layout">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2">
<div ng-transclude></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
If <the-sidebar> is set, I would like to change the template file to something like this:
<div class="container basic-layout">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-8">
<!-- The content here -->
<div ng-transclude></div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-4">
<!-- The sidebar here -->
<div ng-transclude></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

Answer 1

That's the exact case for transclusion. You can parametrize your directive layout with some variable layout (sidebar in this case). To do this your have to set the transclude property in the directive config object to true and also specify where in your directive's layout the changing content should be injected by using the ng-transclude directive. Like this:
return {
...
transluce: true,
...
}
and now in the directive template:
//other layout here
<div ng-transclude></div>
This way all the content you put inside the <basic-layout> directive will be transfered into the element on which you use ng-transclude.

Answer 2

For this to work, you need to manually transclude using the transclude function passed as a 5th parameter to the link function. To make it easier, I would change the template to have placeholders:
<div>
<content-placeholder></content-placeholder>
<div>
<sidebar-placeholder></sidebar-placeholder>
</div>
</div>
Then, place each content where it belongs:
transclude: true,
link: function(scope, element, attrs, ctrls, transclude){
transclude(function(clone){
var sidebar = clone.find("the-sidebar").remove();
element.find("content-placeholder").replaceWith(clone);
element.find("sidebar-placeholder").replaceWith(sidebar);
});
}
This should work for you, but it's not clear to me why you want to build a directive for a general layout.
If you have many pages in the Web app (in a classical non-SPA sense), then it's probably better to create the scaffolding in a "master page" on the server.
Otherwise, if you mean that you have many "views" of the same app, the I suggest looking into ui-router - specifically into a section of Nested States and Nested Views.