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Mastering Angular Components
Mastering Angular Components

Mastering Angular Components: Build component-based user interfaces with Angular , Second Edition

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Mastering Angular Components

Ready, Set, Go!

In this chapter, we will start building our task management application. We'll jump right into the core of the application and create the initial components required to manage a simple task list.

In the process of going through this chapter, you'll learn about the following topics:

  • Introduction to NgModule
  • Bootstrapping an Angular application using a main module
  • Component input and output
  • Host property binding
  • Styling and view encapsulation
  • Using EventEmitter to emit custom events
  • Component life cycle

Managing tasks

After picking up the basics from the previous chapter, we will now go on and create a task management application together in the upcoming chapters. You'll learn about some concepts during these chapters and then use them with practical examples. You'll also learn how to structure an application using components. This begins with the folder structure and ends with setting up the interaction between components.

Vision

The task management application, which we're going to create during the course of this book, should enable users to manage tasks easily and help them organize small projects. Usability is the central aspect of any application; therefore, you'll need to design a modern and flexible...

Starting from scratch

Let's start out by creating a new Angular project using the Angular CLI. We'll name it mastering-angular-components:

  1. Open a console window and navigate to a proper workspace for our project. Let's use the Angular CLI to create our initial project structure:
ng new mastering-angular-components --prefix=mac
  1. After the project has been successfully created, let's move into the project folder and start serving using the ng serve command:
cd mastering-angular-components
ng serve

After following the preceding steps, you should be able to open up your browser and point it to http://localhost:4200. You should be able to see the generated application app with a welcome message saying Welcome to mac!.

It's recommended that you leave the serving mode of the CLI running all the time while in development. Since the underlying webpack will use...

Creating a task list

Now that we have our main application component set up, we can go on and start fleshing out our task management application. The second component that we're going to create will be responsible for listing tasks. Following the concept of composition, we'll create a task list component as a subcomponent of our main application component.

Let's create a new component for our task list by using the Angular CLI generator functionality. We already want to structure our application by area, where we put all task-relevant components into a tasks subfolder:

ng generate component --spec false -ve none tasks/task-list

Using the --spec false option while generating our component, we can skip creating test specifications. Since we're going to cover testing in a later chapter, we're skipping this process for the moment. Also, by using the -ve none...

The right size of components

Our task list is displayed correctly and the code we used to achieve this looks quite okay. However, if we want to follow a better approach for composition, we should rethink the design of our task list component. If we draw a line at enlisting the task list's responsibilities, we would come up with things such as listing tasks, adding new tasks to the list, sorting or filtering the task list; however, operations are not performed on an individual task itself. Also, rendering the task itself falls outside of the responsibilities of the task list. The task list component should only serve as a container for tasks.

If we look at our code again, we will see that we're violating the single responsibility principle and rendered the whole task body within our task list component. Let's take a look at how we can fix this by increasing the granularity...

Adding tasks

Our task list looks nice already, but it would be quite useless if the user is unable to add new tasks to the list. Let's create a component for entering new tasks together. Let's create a new component with the responsibilities of handling all the UI logic necessary for entering a new task to our list.

Let's use the Angular CLI tool to create a new component stub:

ng generate component --spec false -ve none tasks/enter-task

Open up the template of the newly created component located at src/app/tasks/enter-task/enter-task.component.html and apply the following changes:

<input type="text"
       placeholder="Enter new task title..." 
       #titleInput> 
<button (click)="enterTask(titleInput)"> 
  Add Task 
</button>

This template consists of an input field as well as a button to enter a new task. If you...

Custom UI elements

The standard UI elements in the browser are great, but sometimes, modern web applications require smarter and more complex input elements than the ones available within the browser.

We'll now create two specific custom UI elements that we'll use within our application going forward in order to provide a nice user experience:

  • Checkbox: There's already a native checkbox input in the browser, but sometimes, it's hard to fit it into the visual design of an application. Native checkboxes are limited in their styling possibilities, and therefore, it's hard to make them look great. Sometimes, it's those minor details that make an application look appealing.
  • Toggle buttons: This is a list of toggle buttons, where only one button can be toggled within the list. They can also be represented with a native radio button list. However, like...

Task data service

We have already learned a lot about building basic components and how to compose them together in order to form larger components. In the previous building block, we created a reusable checkbox UI component, which we've used to enhance the usability of our task list.

In this topic, we will use the toggle button component to create a filter for our task list. But before we start to introduce more complexity into our application, we're going to refactor our application by introducing data services. As our application gets larger, it's crucial to centralize our data manipulation and streamline our data flow. Services come in very handy since they allow us to store state which is accessible in all our components using Angular's dependency injection.

Going forward, we'll deal with quite a lot of data within our application. TypeScript supports...

Filtering tasks

In this section, we're going to implement some filter functionality for our task list. In order to control the active filter criteria, we are first building a toggle button list component. Let's go ahead and create a new component using the Angular CLI:

ng generate component --spec false -ve none ui/toggle

After running the Angular CLI generator command on your console, let's edit the HTML template of the newly created component in src/app/ui/toggle/toggle.component.html:

<button class="toggle-button" 
        *ngFor="let button of buttonList" 
        [class.active]="button === activeButton" 
        (click)="activate(button)">{{button}}</button> 

Nothing special here, really! We repeat a button by iterating over an instance field called buttonList using the NgFor directive. This button list will...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned a lot of new concepts on building UI component-based applications with Angular. We also built the core component of our task management application, which is the task list itself. You learned about the concept of input and output properties and how to use them to establish proper component communication.

We also covered the basics of the Angular component life cycle and how to use life cycle hooks to execute post-initialization steps within the OnInit hook.

As the last step, we integrated a toggle button list component within our task list to filter the task states. We refactored our task list component to use a service in order to obtain task data. For this, we used Angular's dependency injection.

Within the next chapter, we're going to look at ways how to improve our handling of data and state. There are plenty of ways how to deal...

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Key benefits

  • Produce efficient web applications with highly scalable Angular concepts
  • Learn new ways to design your web applications
  • Build a fully functional web application to tackle real-world user interface problems using Angular components

Description

Mastering Angular Components will help you learn how to invent, build, and manage shared and reusable components for your web projects. Angular components are an integral part of any Angular app and are responsible for performing specific tasks in controlling the user interface. Complete with detailed explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, the book begins by helping you build basic layout components, along with developing a fully functional task-management application using Angular. You’ll then learn how to create layout components and build clean data and state architecture for your application. The book will even help you understand component-based routing and create components that render Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll be able to visualize data using the third-party library Chartist and create a plugin architecture using Angular components. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the component-based architecture in Angular and have the skills you need to build modern and clean user interfaces.

Who is this book for?

This book is for Angular developers who want to design scalable web applications using the most important Angular components. A good understanding of basic frontend web technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is required.

What you will learn

  • Use TypeScript to create Angular 6 components
  • Understand component composition to solve complex UI requirements
  • Create an architecture using pure components and container components
  • Explore the basics of RxJS observable streams to build applications
  • Implement the Angular router to make your application navigable
  • Design reusable and dynamic graphical content using Angular components and SVG
  • Integrate third-party libraries such as Moment.js and Chartist into your existing Angular application

Product Details

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Publication date : Jul 18, 2018
Length: 402 pages
Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788293532
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Product Details

Publication date : Jul 18, 2018
Length: 402 pages
Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788293532
Vendor :
Google
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Tools :

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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
Component-Based User Interfaces Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Ready, Set, Go! Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Dealing with Data and State Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Thinking in Projects Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Component-Based Routing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Keeping up with Activities Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Components for User Experience Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Time Will Tell Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Spaceship Dashboard Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Putting Things to the Test Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
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