Using AngularJS routing with a single-page web app - angularjs

I read about angularJS routing. I want to implement it in my web app, but unfortunately I have a rather difficult situation changing to routing now I think. This is how my app works now (and I know it's probably not the way it should, but it does work):
I have one controller for the whole app.
The view is built with some divs, one of which is a menu div. The others are 'partial' views as angularjs calls them I guess. But the problem I see here is that two of my partial views can be shown at the same time (page is built like this, partial view only takes a portion of the page for itself).
So what I am doing is: I click the button on the menu -> one partial view shows up (ng-show), then I can click something on this partial view to get the second partial view opened on the same page (menu and first partial must stay the way they are).
At the moment I include partials within some divs with php include (which is I am sure the wrong way) and the divs have ng-show on them so that nothing is shown on the beginning. Then I manipulate all the clicks in the menu with setting ng-show parameters of all my partials (views). So if one button is clicked I hide all the others (with ng-click and a function inside controller). But this is tedious work and not the angularJS way and that is why I am asking this question here.
Example of my included partial (stripped of all unnecessary css classes etc):
<div ng-show="showNames">
<?php include_once("views/AREA1/names.php") ?>
</div>
And names.php has for instance just some few elements with ng-repeat and other angularJS directives… I have many includes like that and they work with just ng-show manipulation very well. But now that I grasped some of the AngularJS concepts I see that I made a mistake…
To sum up: how can I use angularJS routes (with ng-view perhaps?-not necessary) to show views within my web app? (taking into account the situation that I have described above). I just want user to be able to know on what "part of page" he is at any given moment.
EDIT: I went trough this and I reckon I could work it out: I need a structure similar to the one in this example 2.1 Online Demo, but furthermore I need to be able to click something on ng-view which should open another view (first one should stay in place). Any idea how to accomplish this?

By using routing feature in AngularJS, the html content of ng-view will be totally replaced by the new partial. You should not use ng-view for such a purpose like showing multiple partials at the same time.
But you can think about mix the ng-view and ng-include.
Let's say, we click each item on the menu, ng-view changes the sub-partial, you can have ng-include in your sub-partials which we can all it here like sub-sub-partial.
Try reading ng-include

AngularJS has ng-view which would contain the main theme of current context, rest of the UI elements are all managed by ng-include. Routes also work in sync with nv-view.
If your view requirement are complex look at ui-router component that supports various combinations.

Related

Best practices how to hide elements in web app using Angular

For example we have a web app and sometimes we need to hide or show some custom directives or html parts using ng-if/ng-show/ng-hide. What we do, we click on a link "Example Show Link" and our elements appear or disappear.
So, here is the Problem:
When you go to another page/state/controller of course your directive/html part is still visible.
Is there any cool solution to hide this parts?
Except using rootScope or pushing true/false flag in every controller, 'couse there could be a lot of directives and a lot of controller
You can use routes for this, and ui-router is what I think the best one that handles this. When you use routes, only the current states' templates are shown, when you navigate out of the state, its template (together with all the directives in it) are destroyed. It automatically do it for you.

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.

AngularJS: ng-include or directive

I have a top menu in my angular app. Since the menu is static, it is not included in the ng-view.
I could leave the menu source in the index.html, but for cleaner markup I decided to pull it into a partial.
Now my question: Is it better practice to use ng-include and a separate controller or implement a custom directive instead?
I won't really reuse the code so I think ng-include would be fine but a directive somehow feels more "the angular way"...
ng-include is just fine to load partial views for your application(I assume that your index.html is kind of a master page with one ng-view section).
Each section that is loaded can have it's own controller(e.g. if you have a div with 'hot news' that fetches stuff from the db, you can just include the partial view using ng-include and let the new view have a ng-controller directive that will perform a ajax call to fetch stuff from the db).
I would add a directive only if need extra functionallity.
If you can live without it then why bother?
Is it better practice to use ng-include and a separate controller or
implement a custom directive instead?
Best practice is always subjective.
I have taken this approach:
If I want to build for reuse; I create a directive.
If I want to separate code for organizational purposes, I use an ng-include
I would seriously suggest looking at ui-router (https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router), which gives you an enormous amount of flexibility to setup layout pages that have different sections (main, left-nav, content). It's a much more flexible means of using Angular to setup page structure so that you don't have to repeat yourself. It's also tremendously powerful by allow you precise control over different section of a page depending on where people are in your application.
The docs do a reasonably good job explaining it, but try to focus on the area which talks about multiple-named views.
ng-include will work fine, but it if you want more control, ui-router is the way to go.

Loading in additional partials with angularjs

I use ng-view to pull in a partial to page. After that I would like to load in another partial to the page that would be right next to the initial partial that was brought in.
How would I bring in another partial from a angular controller?
Because of how ngRoute was designed, you can only have one ng-view per ng-app instance.
However, it looks like you are looking for ng-include since the routes do not seem to come into play.
Otherwise, to work around the issue of URL routing having only one template, you have two options:
Use ui-router Note: Under heavy development, may introduce breaking changes.
Define and use two angular applications which can reuse the controller/service code. However, then the two applications will not be able to share state.

How to switch out only a specfic "view" of the page in angularjs?

I have an index.html with an ng-view within the page at a specific region. I want to make it such that when I click on a button on the page, the ng-view switches to another view, but without having to define a new route or trigger a route change. The following options are what I am thinking:
A main controller around everything. Each region/view would have its own controller (subcontroller1 and subcontroller2). Main controller has the responsiblity of switching views when appropriate without route.
Is this the right train of thinking? Are there any examples of switching just a part of the page?
For the first part of your question : no, you can't partially use ng-view. There is only one ng-view per angularjs app, and the ng-view switches to another view according to the router.
You can load specific part of a page by using ng-switch, so that only part of the DOM are loaded according to the value of the ng-switch : http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngSwitch
Probably the closest answer to your question is to have look at the ui-router, in order to use nested routing : https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-router

Resources