AngularJS Phone Catalog Tutorial Application

Overview

This application takes the developer through the process of building a web-application using angular. The application is loosely based on the Google Phone Gallery, which no longer exists. Here is a historical reference: Google Phone Gallery on WayBack.

Each tagged commit is a separate lesson teaching a single aspect of angular.

The full tutorial can be found at http://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial.

Prerequisites

Git

• A good place to learn about setting up git is here.
• Git home (download, documentation).

Node.js and Tools

• Get Node.js.
• Install the tool dependencies (npm install).

Workings of the application

• The application filesystem layout structure is based on the angular-seed project.
• There is no dynamic backend (no application server) for this application. Instead we fake the application server by fetching static json files.
• Read the Development section at the end to familiarize yourself with running and developing an angular application.

Commits / Tutorial Outline

You can check out any point of the tutorial using git checkout step-?

To see the changes which between any two lessons use the git diff command. git diff step-?..step-?

step-0

• Add ngApp directive to bootstrap the app.
• Add simple template with an expression.

step-1

• Add static html list with two phones into index.html. We will convert this static page into dynamic one with the help of angular.

step-2

• Convert the static html list into dynamic one by:
  • creating PhoneListCtrl controller for the application.
  • extracting the data from HTML, moving it into the controller as an in-memory dataset.
  • converting the static HTML document into an Angular template with the use of the ngRepeat directive which iterates over the dataset of phones. ngRepeat clones its contents for each instance in the dataset and renders it into the view.
• Add a simple unit test to show off how to write tests and run them with Karma.

step-3

• Add a search box to demonstrate how:
  • the data-binding works on input fields.
  • to use the filter filter.
  • ngRepeat automatically shrinks and grows the number of phones in the view.
• Add an end-to-end test to:
  • show how end-to-end tests are written and how to run them with Protractor.
  • prove that the search box and the repeater are correctly wired together.

step-4

• Add age property to each phone in the data model.
• Add a <select> input to change the phone list order.
• Override the default order value in the controller.
• Add unit and e2e tests for this feature.

step-5

• Replace the in-memory dataset with data loaded from the server (in the form of static phones.json file).
  • The phones.json file is loaded using the $http service.
• Demonstrate the use of [services][service] and dependency injection.
  • The [$http] service is injected into the controller through dependency injection.

step-6

• Add phone images and links to new pages that show the phone details.
• Add end2end tests that verify the links to the detail pages.
• Add CSS to style the page just a notch.

step-7

• Introduce the $route service which allows binding URLs for deep-linking with views:

  • Create PhoneCatCtrl which governs the entire app and contains $route configuration.
  • Install angular-route using bower and load the ngRoute module. (Be sure to run npm install again.)
  • Copy route parameters to root scope params property for access in sub controllers.
  • Replace the contents of index.html with the ngView directive, which will display the partial template of the current route.

• Create phone list route:

  • Map /phones route to PhoneListCtrl and partials/phones-list.html.
  • Preserve existing PhoneListCtrl controller.
  • Move existing html from index.html to partials/phone-list.html.

• Create phone details route:

  • Map /phones/<phone-id> route to PhoneDetailCtrl and partials/phones-detail.html.
  • Create empty placeholder PhoneDetailsCtrl controller.

step-8

• Implement PhoneDetailCtrl controller to fetch the details for a specific phone from a JSON file using $http service.
• Update the template for the phone detailed view.
• Add CSS to make the phone details page look "pretty".

step-9

• Add custom checkmark filter.
• Update phone detail template to use checkmark filter.
• Add unit test for the filter.

step-10

In the phone detail view, clicking on a thumbnail image, changes the main phone image to be the large version of the thumbnail image.

• Define mainImageUrl model variable in the PhoneDetailCtrl and set its default value.
• Create setImage() controller method to change mainImageUrl.
• Register an expression with the ngClick directive on thumb images to set the main image, using setImage().
• Add e2e tests for this feature.
• Add CSS to change the mouse cursor when user points at thumnail images.

step-11

• Replace [$http] with $resource.
• Created a custom Phone service that represents the $resource client.

step-12

• Add animations to the application:
  • Animate changes to the phone list, adding, removing and reordering phones.
  • Animate changes to the main phone image in the detail view.

Development with angular-phonecat

The following docs describe how you can test and develop further this application.

Installing dependencies

The application relies upon various node.js tools, such as Bower, Karma and Protractor. You can install these by running:

npm install

This will also run bower, which will download the angular files needed for the current step of the tutorial.

Most of the scripts described below will run this automatically but it doesn't do any harm to run it whenever you like.

Running the app during development

• Run npm start
• navigate your browser to http://localhost:8000/app/index.html to see the app running in your browser.

Running unit tests

We recommend using Jasmine and Karma for your unit tests/specs, but you are free to use whatever works for you.

• Start Karma with npm test
  • A browser will start and connect to the Karma server. Chrome is the default browser, others can be captured by loading the same url as the one in Chrome or by changing the test/karma.conf.js file.
• Karma will sit and watch your application and test JavaScript files. To run or re-run tests just change any of your these files.

End to end testing

We recommend using Jasmine and Protractor for end-to-end testing.

Requires a webserver that serves the application. See Running the app during development, above.

• Serve the application: run npm start.
• In a separate console run the end2end tests: npm run protractor. Protractor will execute the end2end test scripts against the web application itself.
  • The configuration is set up to run the tests on Chrome directly. If you want to run against other browsers then you must install the webDriver, npm run update-webdriver, and modify the configuration at test/protractor-conf.js.

Application Directory Layout

app/                --> all of the files to be used in production
  css/              --> css files
    app.css         --> default stylesheet
  img/              --> image files
  index.html        --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
  js/               --> javascript files
    app.js          --> the main application module
    controllers.js  --> application controllers
    directives.js   --> application directives
    filters.js      --> custom angular filters
    services.js     --> custom angular services
    animations.js   --> hooks for running JQuery animations with ngAnimate
  partials/         --> angular view partials (partial html templates) used by ngRoute
    partial1.html
    partial2.html
  bower_components  --> 3rd party js libraries, including angular and jquery

scripts/            --> handy scripts
  update-repo.sh       --> pull down the latest version of this repos
                           (BE CAREFUL THIS DELETES ALL CHANGES YOU HAVE MADE)
  private/             --> private scripts used by the Angular Team to maintain this repo
test/               --> test source files and libraries
  karma.conf.js        --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
  protractor-conf.js   --> config file for running e2e tests with Protractor
  e2e/
    scenarios.js       --> end-to-end specs
  unit/             --> unit level specs/tests
    controllersSpec.js --> specs for controllers
    directivesSpec.js  --> specs for directives
    filtersSpec.js     --> specs for filters
    servicesSpec.js    --> specs for services

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/