nghelper

ngHelper-Toolbar: Now supports secondary actions & dividers

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The $toolbar service is a great helper when it comes to building toolbars in AngularJS applications. The new version 0.0.3 allows you to handle new secondary actions, as shown here in the Azure Cost Monitor application:

secondary-actions

The secondary action can be defined in the addItem function similar to all other options the API supports:

$toolbar.addItem(‘childContract, contract, null, null, true, ‘/report/1234’, null, ‘activeContract’, ‘fa-trash’, function () {                   $scope.removeContract(contract);
});

Making the menu more user-friendly can be achieved by adding dividers in the structure. When using the special menu title “DIVIDER” the system will use this in the menu structure as divider:

$toolbar.addItem(‘user.divider’, ‘DIVIDER’, null, null, true, null, null, ‘user’);

The new navigation infrastructure of the Azure Cost Monitor is using the $toolbar service from the ngHelper-Toolbar project. We hope this feature makes it simple to maintain your toolbars. Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try the issue button on the GitHub page or contact the author via this blog.

ngHelperAirbrake: Airbrake for AngularJS

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Airbrake is a well known exception tracker which is used from thousands of users. A cool thing is that the Airbrake team also supports browser based javascript exception. Integrating these kind of javascript code gives AngularJS developers sometime a headache. The newest member of the ngHelper collection, the ngHelperAirbrake component makes it super simple and easy to integrate Airbrake in an existing AngularJS application.

It’s a bower component and works well with scaffolding tools like Yeoman. Installing the component is possible with the following command line:

bower install ng-helper-airbrake –save

After that the component is registered in the bower.json of the project. Moving up the dependency entry to the position right after the inclusion of angular ensures that the Airbrake-Shim is loaded as early as possible when doing a full page reload.

“dependencies”: {
“angular”: “~1.3.8”,
“ng-helper-airbrake”: “~0.1.0”,

ngHelperAirbrake offers the $airbrake angular service which allows to configure the different Airbrake settings. The documentation at our project page describes how to set the right configuration: https://github.com/ngHelper/ngHelperAirbrake

After configuring the project everything works as expected and Airbrake receives exception from the AngularJS application.

Cache Fighters Part 2 – How to handle eager loaded partials/views

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The previous part of this article series described the general behaviour of an AngularJS app when it comes to web caching. Using Yeoman and the generated grunt tasks solved many topics on the existing caching list. This article is focused on the different strategies to handle views & partials.

Views & partials are HTML files which are loaded from the AngularJS application during the first use. Whenever a user navigates to a new sub site or is using a new widget which was never loaded, AngularJS triggers an AJAX call to load the corresponding html file. Inline templates which are part of the javascript files are an exception of course.

Like every HTTP request the AJAX call can be cached from a web cache like the browser as well. Yeoman has out of the box no grunt task onboard to rename this files which would prevent caching.
But there a two options to solve this problem:

The first solution ensures that all external templates are combined to one single file as inline templates. During this process a grunt task generates one single javascript file, which contains all the views & partials. The grunt-angular-templates module allows to implement this behaviour which solves the caching issue in combination with the javascript minification as described in the last article at full length.

The second option is to implement a similar behaviour to what Yeomans grunt tasks ensure for javascript files. Whenever the view or partial is updated it should get a different name and would be reloaded from the server and not from the cache. This lets the application use as much cached files as possible and only reloads over the network when something is changed.

For the Azure Cost Monitor, I wrote a component called ngHelperDynamicTemplateLoader which totally implements this behaviour. The component is implementing a standard interceptor to add a new version parameter to every view loading AJAX call. The default caching strategie just adds a timestamp every time the view is loaded which means no caching at all. Voila, that is what we wanted to achieve.

In the next part of this article series I’m going to describe a real life example. This example will use grunt-ng-constant to generate context which can be used in a custom caching strategy.

Do you know any other options to deal with this topic? Then please leave a comment to kick off a short discussion about it.

ngHelperUserVoice: AngularJS service for the UserVoice API

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UserVoice is a Saas platform that offers different customer engagement tools i.e. feedback- and ticketing tools. A modern web application written in AngularJS, should always offer the user the possibility to open a ticket whenever it is needed. One solution to do so is to use the UserVoice Contact widget, but if you would prefer to use an API, for instance if your contact form has special styles that you don’t want to loose, here is the solution:

The new ngHelper component ngHelperUserVoice is a lightweight angular service for opening tickets in UserVoice. The component follows the angular way of building single page applications and allows the configuration of the module via provider and offers a standard service:

$uservoice.openTicket(“NAME”, “EMAIL”, “SUBJECT”, “MESSAGE”).then(function(ticketId) {
  alert(“Ticket with id: ” + ticketId + ” created”);
}).catch(function(error) {
  alert(“Error: ” + error);
});

This component makes it super simple to interact with the UserVoice API. If you like the component feel free to add other features, I will accept push requests as fast as possible.