Angular provides a mechanism for sharing instance variables inside a component with that template's view component, but how do you access a constant in a view template? Constants in TypeScript are not created as instance variables on a class, so they are not easily accessible inside the HTML template. This post will show you how.

The Setup

Create a new project with the Angular CLI. You can also get access to the full source code in my Blog Sample Github Repo.

Create the Constant File

Create a file in the root directory named constants.ts. Add in a single constant:

This is pretty simple.

Load the Constant in the Component

The trick to access the constant's value inside the view template is to copy the Constant value to an instance variable in the component. Open up the app.component.ts on your new project, and add a line like this:

You'll also need to import the constant:

Update the View Template

Now the View Template can access the constants value. Open up the app.component.html file, ad add something like this:

You're no longer referencing a global constant, but rather a component instance variable that has the same value as the global constant.

It works:

You can use the myConstant value as part of any Angular element in the HTML template including *ngIf, *ngFor, ngModel, or whatever you need.

Don't forget to check out the full code.

When writing unit tests, SpyOn, is used to watch and manipulate a method call, potentially returning your own data. This is used to easily mock external component calls so that your unit test can focus on the class in question without worrying about complications or side affects from external dependencies. I found myself in a situation where I had a class and that class had a read only get() property. I was creating my own Angular service wrapper for the Dragula drag and drop library. I was exposing some drop and remove listeners get methods.

I wanted to control the results returned from that get method. This was not a situation where I could set the underlying value because there was no set method. But, spyOn would not work because a get() method is viewed as a property, not a method. The class code was conceptually like this:

My code was using Angular, so the DragulaService was injected into this component, and the dropListener was exposed via a get.

For the purposes of unit testing, I want complete control over that drop listener Observable. Thankfully, spyOnProperties would give me that control.

The unit test would be a bit like this:

I'm gonna take a quick break to explain spyOnProperty. It takes three parameters:

• Class: The class instance that contains the property you want to watch.
• Property: The name of the property being watched.
• Accessor: The Access Type of the method being watched, in this case get.

Note that we are storing the results of the spyOnProperty in the mySpy variable. This is optional when using spyOn, but for spyOnProperty it is required. The unit test could would continue:

All that line does is access the dropListener property inside the class, which should trigger the spy. Now we can test against the access:

In a more advanced unit test, we could subscribe to the dropListener inside the test, and use dropObserver.next() to trigger the result handler in an async block.

This was something new I just discovered. You can create an Angular provider, as a singleton and do not have to list it in the provider array. This post will show you how.

The setup

To set up this project, I used the Angular CLI to create a new project. Then I created two services: ServiceOneService and ServiceTwoService. I also created two views: view1 and views2. You can find the code behind this project in this blog's GitHub repo.

Modify the main app.component.html template to include the two views:

Create the services

Service1 should look something like this:

It is created as injectable, and has a single property. Open the app.module add this as a provider:

Service2 should look something like this:

The service looks almost identical, even having the same text property on it. The big difference is in the injectable metadata, we added a providedIn: 'root'. This is the trick to creating a provider without defining it as a provider. means that the first time the service is injected, Angular will create the Singleton just as if it were set up as an explicit provider.

The Views

Open up the TypeScript file for view1 and view2 and load the services:

Open up the HTML component for each view and paste this in there:

This just puts an input on the screen, one binding to the service1.text, and the other binding to service2.text.

Since we're using ngModel don't forget to load the import the FormsModule into the appModule:

Run the Code

Now run the code and load it in a browser. When you type in the service 1 input in one component, the input in the other component should also change:

This is what is normal and we're used to because we set up Service1 as a provider and the single instance should be shared between the two components.

Now try to type in the service 2 input. The values also change:

This surprised me, since Service2 is not set up as a provider. However, the `providedIn` metadata tells Angular to create Service2 as a service. It works like magic.

Get The Full Source for this Sample.

This is an excerpt from my Learn With series on Angular 7, which came out about a month ago. I wrote this up for the DotComIt newsletter, and thought I'd share it here too.

This post details how to use Angular's server side proxy to connect the Angular CLI dev server to access the NodeJS application server without having to worry about cross domain issues. The Angular CLI dev server is not set up to run normal server-side code, like custom NodeJS, ColdFusion, PHP, or Java. Instead the preferred approach is to set up a server-side proxy to redirect your Angular calls to your other remote servers.

The first step is to create a proxy config file. Name the file proxy.conf.js and put it in the root directory of the project, where the angular.json file is located. It should start as an empty file, but let's create a constant:

The code also exports the configuration. The PROXY_CONFIG is an array of objects, although for our case we'll just have a single object. First, add a context:

The context value says "Whenever a URL comes in that contains `/nodejs`, we'll redirect it elsewhere. Exactly where you want to redirect it depends on your local configuration. Add a target property:

In the case of NodeJS, we're redirecting the request to a different port on localhost.

Set the secure to false:

In local dev environments I never set up HTTPS or use secure URLs like I would in a production environment. There are a few other values that may be needed or not depending on your local setup. I'll go over them here for completeness.

First, you can have the proxy to rewrite the path:

You'll only need a path rewrite if you need to modify the URL. For example, if your API will call '/nodejs/authenticate', but your actual service is set to '/authenticate', then this will allow you to direct your service call to the proper code.

Another value to be aware of is changeOrigin:

You'll only need to use the changeOrigin value if you are setting up a local alias for your NodeJS sample. For example, if your NodeJS server is set to listen to requests on 'local.nodejs.learn-with.com' then this will tell the proxy it is okay to rewrite domain from localhost to 'local.nodejs.learn-with.com'.

The last value I want you to be aware of is the debug:

When you set this property, the console will give you a lot of details of how the proxy is working and rewriting URLs. It can be handy when you need to debug things.

Final Thoughts

When you run unit tests using the Angular CLI's ng test command you'll often see a browser open up. Sometimes this is useful if you want to debug the unit tests in the browser, however since I have moved the bulk of my unit test debugging to IntelliJ, this is just a minor annoyance.

You can shut it off. Open up the Karma.conf.js file in the src folder of your Angular CLI project. Find this line:

This tells Karma to open Chrome to run the tests. But, there is another option:

Rerun your tests and you'll find that no browser opens up.

I love it when things are easy.

My expertise in UI programming is creating reusable components, but less so on the design side of things. Every once in while I discover something interesting about CSS that I feel is worth sharing. Today I'll show you how to truncate a string with an ellipsis, magically.

First, let's create a few H1:

The truncating will work on any HTML element, I just chose H1 for easy code. How add some CSS:

First add a specific width. Then hide the overflow with overflow and prevent word wraps with white-space. Finally, specify the text-overflow to value ellipsis. This will force the text to truncate if it gets too long:

Play with the code over here.

Sometimes in Angular I have to loop over something in an HTML template. *ngFor is the best way to do that. Something like this:

This is pretty common. I've used it to create a list of items that do not warrant a data grid type structure. I've used it to populate drop downs or to display arrays of images. There are lots of uses for this.

Sometimes, I need to access the index of the array inside the loop. I was using this because I wanted to show which item was selected, and was switching some CSS based on the selected item. How do you access the index of the array inside the loop?

Like this:

It is really simple to do, but just does not come up all that often as this is the less common case.

You can even access a bunch more values inside the loop including determing whether the item is the first first and last item, or if it is is an even or odd element. All these allow you to easily make tweaks to the display.

The Problem

I was working on an Angular component that accepted an array input and created a drop down from it. As part of our internal architecture the component would add a disabled property to certain items on the input. This would permanently modify the input array, which was cached by the app and used elsewhere. We couldn't have that. We decided to make an internal copy of the array so that our local component changes would not affect the global data store. How do we do that?

Normally when I want to create a deep copy of an object, I turn to Try it here

Take a look at the output:

If you look closely at the output between object 1 and object 2, you'll discover that object2 is no longer an array, it is an object. That was the wrong syntax and not what we intended.

Object.Assign() with an Array

We could use Object.assign() with an array instead of an object, like this:

That will give us an array. Make sure that they are separate objects:

That does solve the issue and we have an array:

It isn't the only way to solve the issue, though.

Use a spread operator

The spread operator will do the same thing.

I always forget about the spread operator, but it works well. Depending where you look, there are concerns about it's performance over other options. I'm reusing the same screenshot because there is no change:

Use Slice

You can also create a deep copy of an array using array.slice():

Repeated screenshot because nothing changed:

This is the way I went with, for no other reason than it was used elsewhere in the code base and it pays to be consistent.

Hopefully you learned something. ;)

I've been writing some tests as part of a project I'm working on, and for some reason I could not get a mocked Observable to resolve. This will explain the mistake I made and how to fix it.

The Setup

This component used a resolver to load data before the component loaded. To access a resolver's data, you inject the activated route into the constructor, like this:

In the ngOnInit(), you'd subscribe to the data property:

This saves your MyValue data from the resolver into the local component instances myValue.

Writing The Tests

First, I mocked the ActivatedRoute:

Then, I created an instance of it:

As part of the TestBed's providers:

The first test I wrote was to make sure the subscribe was actively working.

First, I created the observer and component:

Then, I ran the test:

This worked great. Now, I wanted to test to make sure that other methods inside the component's result function worked. To do that I'll have manually trigger the observer:

This should work, right? Nope, it failed ever time. The observer was always null. I was scratching my head and adding a lot of breakpoints and outputs trying to figure out what I had done wrong so far.

What is wrong

The function to create the observable is never run until the observable is subscribed to. Clearly we are subscribing to it in the component code:

So, why doesn't it run? Think about it first, because spoilers are below.

The spy is getting in the way:

Because of the spy in place, the subscribe() function is intercepted, and as such never run, which never runs the function in the Observable's create function, which never saves the Observer. The solution was simple once I figured out what was going on:

Tell the spy to intercept and watch, but still allow the call to go through.

Everything started working wonderfully. :-)

ng-materal provides a bunch of button variants. Each button type is an HTML button that offers identical functionality, but with slightly different designs and colors. Here is an example of two buttons:

If you drill into the button class, you'll see that all the button variants are implemented in the same code base, as directives.

I was doing a code review on a current project and saw that the code was conditionally determining which button type to display:

I was bugged by the fact that we were implementing two button components in our code for what was essentially a style change. That's when I started digging into the specific implementation and discovered that the primary difference between a mat-flat-button and a mat-stroked-button was style changes.

I proposed this alternate approach:

We use the ngClass directive to conditionally flip the style between the flat-button and the stroked-button. It solved our issue with less code.