angular-beacon

In Angular there's no way to know when it has finished rendering items on the screen. Controllers emit $viewContentLoaded and directives call postLink() when Angular has finished cloning the template, but that doesn't mean that DOM nodes were created yet, not that the page has been fully rendered.

Wouldn't it be nice to be told when the page has been fully rendered? Unfortunately, Angular doesn't yet provide us a way to know that.

Some people suggest to wrap your DOM-interacting code inside a couple of nested $timeout calls. Others suggest to check the $digest loop and do your stuff when the queue is empty. The former solution doesn't always work and the latter may suffer from starvation in case you have a constant stream of events coming from another source.

We know this is not the Angular way of doing things but, sometimes, it's unavoidable (additionally, we had to go this route in a couple of projects already).

Angular-Beacon repeatedly checks the DOM until all the elements you need become available (it will try for up to five seconds), then it invokes a callback function (which must have been defined in your scope) in which you can do all the DOM manipulation you want.

How to use

Add angular-beacon to the list of dependencies in your Angular.JS application:

    angular.module('myapp', [
        'ngRoute',
        // ...
        'angular-beacon'
    ]);

Create a callback function in your controller's or directive's scope. As a bonus, all elements found are passed to your callback within an object (see below for details).

    angular.module('myapp').controller('MyController', function ($scope) {
        scope.myCallback = function(cache) {
            console.log('DOM Ready!');
        };
    });

In your view or template, add a reference to the beacon directive, towards the end of it:

    <div class="my-panel">
        ...
    </div>
    <button>Push button</button>
    <beacon waitfor=".my-panel, button" onready="myCallback"></beacon>

myCallback will be called as soon as .my-panel and button appear on the page (as DOM nodes at least).

That is: each beacon directive instances expects two attributes:

• onready is the name of callback function defined inside the current Angular.JS scope which will be called when the DOM is ready.
• waitfor: A comma-separated list of CSS selectors, the same you would use with jQuery. The selector is normalized, replacing all non-alphanumeric characters with underscores and used as the property name holding the cached value in the cache object passed to your callback.