ngRoute/$routeProvider how to keep the views and controllers? - angularjs

so I've written an app, there is a few routes:
1) one that shows chat messages, users list, etc and is kept up to date via the controller
2) game page
3) help page
it works fine, but when click the link for #/game-page, it actually disposes of the chat view, controller, etc. when I click the link for #/chat, it reloads it, but now has to reload all the views and data, which makes it slow and flickery..
I'd really like to just maybe hide the views for the pages that aren't active, so when I switch between them, its instant and everything is still there.
Can anyone recommend a way forward?
Thanks

The views are cached, so they are not reloaded. If you want data to persist between changing views then don't attach that data to the scopes of the views but to an outside scope or an object in an outside scope.
The views would still be compiled, though, every time you switch between them. If that's a concern then I suggest to use ngSwitch.

it's normal behaviour to reload the views and controllers for ngRoute.
probably for your case you could create your own router, catch rout param and hide/show needed bloc with ng-hide

Related

Advantage of angular UIRouter over ng-include?

I'm wondering whether to use angular UI router or just use simple ng-include, i'm failing to fully understand why would i pick to include entire library over the built-in ng-include which gives me about the same functionality with less code?
Can someone explain whats wrong with
<div ng-if="somestate" ng-include="someview"></div>
Can someone explain whats wrong with
<div ng-if="somestate" ng-include="someview"></div>
It doesn't handle URLs in any way. You want the URL to change when you go to another state, and you want the state to change when the URL changes. You want to be able to bookmark a page in your app, or send its URL by email, and come back to this page rather than the home page when opening the bookmark or the link.
It also doesn't allow resolving data before switching to a state.Both ui-router and ngRoute allow doing that: the state changes only when the data needed to display this state has been successfully loaded.
That's the main job of ui-router and ngRoute. ui-router has many other goodies, like events when changing state, named views, state inheritance (very useful to handle a view consisting of several tabs, for example), etc.

General approach of left side menu that loads different content in a center of the page

I've started to learn AngularJS but I need some application design hints. Of course I'm not asking about the layout but ... how to design my application and it's controllers in a proper way. I have left sidebar with a menu that is loaded from the web using JSON. That needs a controller. That's fine. It works for me. There's a content box as well in a center of my page that loads some data dynamically. In my opinion it requires another controller.
And now comes my solution, that somehow doesn't look good IMHO. When I click a menu item in my sidebar I'm loading a content. Then I'm passing this data into a Service which emits an Event afterwards to the Second controller (which is responsible for controlling my content in a center of my page). When it receives this event it simply gets previously loaded data from the Service and displays it. It generally works.... but ... I'm pretty sure that's not the proper way of doing this.
I would be grateful for any hints. AngularJS has a really poor documentation and tutorial :(
cheers
EDIT:
OK. That's my basic application using JQuery:
http://greatanubis-motoscore.rhcloud.com/index
And that's the same application I'm converting into AngularJS:
http://greatanubis-motoscore.rhcloud.com/angular/index
No worries, some text is in Polish but... I think it really doesn't matter ;)
Note for the AngularJS version: At the moment the content is a HTML but finally it will load JSON data as the other controllers.
I would go about doing this with angular ui-router. With ui-router you can achieve this in a couple of ways. You can use nested routing to have a base state (Your sidebar menu, header etc.) which will act as your shell page, this can have its own controller as well. You could then define each of those other views as child states of the base state. These child states can also have their own controller/views as well, but they will be sitting inside the base state (both visually, and also inherit $scope properties of the base state) optionally they can have separated URLs themselves, but they don't have to, you can just change states without changing the url, by leaving the URL bit empty when you define different states in your $stateProvider configs. Another way would be to use the multiple named views feature.

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

angularjs: tabbed view design issue

[EDIT]
Similar question to Complex nesting of partials and templates
As of now, is it better to use Angular-UI state solution or should I stick with ng-includes ?
So far I had one view per URL in my AngularJS application. I need to build a new view, which should have 3 tabs and I'm having troubles trying to figure out how I'm going to design the view - architecture-wise that is.
Note that the business model object behind these 3 tabs is the same one.
The first tab is for viewing and editing data on the business object. So that's already two 'views' within the first tab.
The second tab is for viewing a paged-table showing data from a child collection of the business object.
The third tab does the same thing as the second one but for another child collection.
Obviously, I do not want to load the entire business object at once. I'll load the collections only if the user navigates to the 2nd or 3rd tabs.
My main concern right now is how am I going to organize the views ? AngularJS has this limitation of only 1-view per page.
Also, I need to handle browser history, so the URL must change when a tab is selected, but I should have to reload any data (i.e I must not reload the controller).
Any tips would be much appreciated.
For the record, I ended up using ui-router and its state management, which is awesome. It took me a bit of time to understand the concepts and to put that in practice, but I managed to build a pretty complex set of layouts effortlessly !

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