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# Monday, May 4, 2015

Having a strong experience in ASP.NET and JSF, we found angular's transclusion concept is obscure and counterintuitive. It took a while for both of us to grasp the transclude's ideas described the Developer Guide. We suspect that this is due to the bad design: a bad design leads to a bad wording.

The other consequence of the bad design is that the transclusion is limited to one template per directive, which limits the use of the feature.

Consider:

  • A directive my-page that encapsulates a page with menu and content.
  • my-page uses templateUrl: my-page.html to render the page.
  • my-page.html defines two sites where menu and page content have to be embedded.
  • Two content fragments are passed to my-page to fill content sites.

Unfortunately, you cannot immediately implement this design in angularjs. On the other hand ASP.NET's Master Pages, and JSF's ui:composition readily solve this task.

Here is one of JSF's approaches:

  1. Define page template my-page.xhtml:
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
      xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">
      <h:body>
        <table>
          <tr>
            <td><ui:insert name="menu"/></td>
          </tr>
          <tr>
            <td><ui:insert name="content"/></td>
          </tr>
        </table>
      </h:body>
    </html>
  2. Use ui:composition tag to pass parts to the template:
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
      xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">
      <h:body>
        <ui:composition template="my-page.xhtml">
          <ui:define name="content">
            My Content
          <ui:define>
          <ui:define name="menu">
            <a href="#file">File</a>
            <a href="#edit">Edit</a>
            <a href="#view">View</a>
          <ui:define>
        </ui:composition>
      </h:body>
    </html>

We have decided to model angular directives after JSF, and have defined three simple directives: ui-template, ui-insert, ui-define (see angularjs-api/template/ui-lib.js).

To define a template one writes the following markup (see angularjs-api/template/my-page.html):

<table ui-template>
  <tr>
    <td ui-insert="menu"></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td ui-insert="content"></td>
  </tr>
</table>

and declares a directive (see angularjs-api/template/my-page.js):

var myPage =
{
  templateUrl: "my-page.html",
  transclude: true
};

angular.module("app").
  directive("myPage", function() { return myPage; });

and finally, to instantiate the directive one needs to write (see angularjs-api/template/sample.html):

<my-page>
  <div ui-define="content">
    My content
  </div>
  <div ui-define="menu">
    <a href="#file">File</a>
    <a href="#edit">Edit</a>
    <a href="#view">View</a>
  </div>
</my-page>

The working sample can be seen through rawgit: sample.html

The other sample that integrates with routing can be found at sample-routing.html

Monday, May 4, 2015 1:07:53 PM UTC  #    Comments [0] -
AngularJS | javascript | Thinking aloud
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