In this step, you will learn how to create a layout template and how to build an app that has multiple views by adding routing, using an Angular module called 'ngRoute'.
app/index.html, you are redirected to app/index.html#/phones
and the phone list appears in the browser.The routing functionality added by this step is provided by angular in the ngRoute module, which
is distributed separately from the core Angular framework.
We are using Bower to install client side dependencies. This step updates the
bower.json configuration file to include the new dependency:
{
"name": "angular-seed",
"description": "A starter project for AngularJS",
"version": "0.0.0",
"homepage": "https://github.com/angular/angular-seed",
"license": "MIT",
"private": true,
"dependencies": {
"angular": "1.2.x",
"angular-mocks": "~1.2.x",
"bootstrap": "~3.1.1",
"angular-route": "~1.2.x"
}
}The new dependency "angular-route": "~1.2.x" tells bower to install a version of the
angular-route component that is compatible with version 1.2.x. We must tell bower to download
and install this dependency.
If you have bower installed globally then you can run bower install but for this project we have
preconfigured npm to run bower install for us:
npm installOur app is slowly growing and becoming more complex. Before step 7, the app provided our users with
a single view (the list of all phones), and all of the template code was located in the
index.html file. The next step in building the app is to add a view that will show detailed
information about each of the devices in our list.
To add the detailed view, we could expand the index.html file to contain template code for both
views, but that would get messy very quickly. Instead, we are going to turn the index.html
template into what we call a "layout template". This is a template that is common for all views in
our application. Other "partial templates" are then included into this layout template depending on
the current "route" — the view that is currently displayed to the user.
Application routes in Angular are declared via the $routeProvider, which is the provider of the $route service. This service makes it easy to wire together controllers, view templates, and the current URL location in the browser. Using this feature we can implement deep linking, which lets us utilize the browser's history (back and forward navigation) and bookmarks.
As you noticed, dependency injection (DI) is at the core of AngularJS, so it's important for you to understand a thing or two about how it works.
When the application bootstraps, Angular creates an injector that will be used for all DI stuff in
this app. The injector itself doesn't know anything about what $http or $route services do, in
fact it doesn't even know about the existence of these services unless it is configured with proper
module definitions. The sole responsibilities of the injector are to load specified module
definition(s), register all service providers defined in these modules, and when asked, inject
a specified function with dependencies (services) that it lazily instantiates via their providers.
Providers are objects that provide (create) instances of services and expose configuration APIs
that can be used to control the creation and runtime behavior of a service. In case of the $route
service, the $routeProvider exposes APIs that allow you to define routes for your application.
config functions. Thus you could not inject
$routeProvider into PhoneListCtrl.
Angular modules solve the problem of removing global state from the application and provide a way of configuring the injector. As opposed to AMD or require.js modules, Angular modules don't try to solve the problem of script load ordering or lazy script fetching. These goals are totally independent and both module systems can live side by side and fulfill their goals.
To deepen your understanding of DI on Angular, see Understanding Dependency Injection.
The $route service is usually used in conjunction with the ngView directive. The role of the ngView directive is to include the view template for the current
route into the layout template. This makes it a perfect fit for our index.html template.
ngRoute is in its own module and must be loaded by
loading the additional angular-route.js file, which we download via Bower above.
app/index.html:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en" ng-app="phonecatApp">
<head>
...
<script src="bower_components/angular/angular.js"></script>
<script src="bower_components/angular-route/angular-route.js"></script>
<script src="js/app.js"></script>
<script src="js/controllers.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div ng-view></div>
</body>
</html>We have added two new <script> tags in our index file to load up extra JavaScript files into our
application:
angular-route.js : defines the Angular ngRoute module, which provides us with routing.app.js : this file now holds the root module of our application.Note that we removed most of the code in the index.html template and replaced it with a single
line containing a div with the ng-view attribute. The code that we removed was placed into the
phone-list.html template:
app/partials/phone-list.html:
<div class="container-fluid">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-2">
<!--Sidebar content-->
Search: <input ng-model="query">
Sort by:
<select ng-model="orderProp">
<option value="name">Alphabetical</option>
<option value="age">Newest</option>
</select>
</div>
<div class="col-md-10">
<!--Body content-->
<ul class="phones">
<li ng-repeat="phone in phones | filter:query | orderBy:orderProp" class="thumbnail">
<a href="#/phones/{{phone.id}}" class="thumb"><img ng-src="{{phone.imageUrl}}"></a>
<a href="#/phones/{{phone.id}}">{{phone.name}}</a>
<p>{{phone.snippet}}</p>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>We also added a placeholder template for the phone details view:
app/partials/phone-detail.html:
TBD: detail view for <span>{{phoneId}}</span>Note how we are using the phoneId expression which will be defined in the PhoneDetailCtrl controller.
To improve the organization of the app, we are making use of Angular's ngRoute module and we've
moved the controllers into their own module phonecatControllers (as shown below).
We added angular-route.js to index.html and created a new phonecatControllers module in
controllers.js. That's not all we need to do to be able to use their code, however. We also have
to add the modules dependencies of our app. By listing these two modules as dependencies of
phonecatApp, we can use the directives and services they provide.
app/js/app.js:
var phonecatApp = angular.module('phonecatApp', [
'ngRoute',
'phonecatControllers'
]);
...Notice the second argument passed to angular.module, ['ngRoute', 'phonecatControllers']. This
array lists the modules that phonecatApp depends on.
...
phonecatApp.config(['$routeProvider',
function($routeProvider) {
$routeProvider.
when('/phones', {
templateUrl: 'partials/phone-list.html',
controller: 'PhoneListCtrl'
}).
when('/phones/:phoneId', {
templateUrl: 'partials/phone-detail.html',
controller: 'PhoneDetailCtrl'
}).
otherwise({
redirectTo: '/phones'
});
}]);Using the phonecatApp.config() method, we request the $routeProvider to be injected into our
config function and use the $routeProvider.when() method to
define our routes.
Our application routes are defined as follows:
when('/phones'): The phone list view will be shown when the URL hash fragment is /phones. To
construct this view, Angular will use the phone-list.html template and the PhoneListCtrl
controller.
when('/phones/:phoneId'): The phone details view will be shown when the URL hash fragment
matches '/phone/:phoneId', where :phoneId is a variable part of the URL. To construct the phone
details view, Angular will use the phone-detail.html template and the PhoneDetailCtrl
controller.
otherwise({redirectTo: '/phones'}): triggers a redirection to /phones when the browser
address doesn't match either of our routes.
We reused the PhoneListCtrl controller that we constructed in previous steps and we added a new,
empty PhoneDetailCtrl controller to the app/js/controllers.js file for the phone details view.
Note the use of the :phoneId parameter in the second route declaration. The $route service uses
the route declaration — '/phones/:phoneId' — as a template that is matched against the current
URL. All variables defined with the : notation are extracted into the
$routeParams object.
app/js/controllers.js:
var phonecatControllers = angular.module('phonecatControllers', []);
phonecatControllers.controller('PhoneListCtrl', ['$scope', '$http',
function ($scope, $http) {
$http.get('phones/phones.json').success(function(data) {
$scope.phones = data;
});
$scope.orderProp = 'age';
}]);
phonecatControllers.controller('PhoneDetailCtrl', ['$scope', '$routeParams',
function($scope, $routeParams) {
$scope.phoneId = $routeParams.phoneId;
}]);Again, note that we created a new module called phonecatControllers. For small AngularJS
applications, it's common to create just one module for all of your controllers if there are just a
few. As your application grows it is quite common to refactor your code into additional modules.
For larger apps, you will probably want to create separate modules for each major feature of
your app.
Because our example app is relatively small, we'll just add all of our controllers to the
phonecatControllers module.
To automatically verify that everything is wired properly, we wrote end-to-end tests that navigate to various URLs and verify that the correct view was rendered.
...
it('should redirect index.html to index.html#/phones', function() {
browser.get('app/index.html');
browser.getLocationAbsUrl().then(function(url) {
expect(url.split('#')[1]).toBe('/phones');
});
});
describe('Phone list view', function() {
beforeEach(function() {
browser.get('app/index.html#/phones');
});
...
describe('Phone detail view', function() {
beforeEach(function() {
browser.get('app/index.html#/phones/nexus-s');
});
it('should display placeholder page with phoneId', function() {
expect(element(by.binding('phoneId')).getText()).toBe('nexus-s');
});
});You can now rerun npm run protractor to see the tests run.
{{orderProp}} binding to index.html, and you'll see that nothing happens even
when you are in the phone list view. This is because the orderProp model is visible only in the
scope managed by PhoneListCtrl, which is associated with the <div ng-view> element. If you add
the same binding into the phone-list.html template, the binding will work as expected.With the routing set up and the phone list view implemented, we're ready to go to step 8 to implement the phone details view.