[Learn Angular 7] Familiarize yourself with Angular components

Tram Ho

Working With Arrays

In the previous lesson, the basic components we tried created a new UserItemComponent , to say “Hello” to a user. What if we want to say “Hello” to a list user’s name? In Angular, we can loop a list of objects in the template by using the *ngFor syntax. The idea here is that we are going to loop the same type to a collection of objects.

If you have worked with AngularJS 1.X before, then you probably used ng-repeat directive. NgFor works the same way.

Now we will create a new component to render a list of users.

Now we will replace the <app-user-item> tag with the <app-user-list> app.component.html in app.component.html

src / app / app.component.html

Just like how we added a property name to UserItemComponent , we will now add property names to UserListComponent .
However, instead of storing only a single string, we will store this type of property as an array of strings. An array is denoted by the [] character, and the specific code will look like this:

src / app / user-list / user-list.component.ts

The first change is to specify a new string[] property in our UserListComponent class. This syntax means that names are typed as an array of strings . Another way of writing it is Array<string>
We changed the constructor to set the value of this.names to ['Ari', 'Carlos', 'Felipe', 'Nate'].
Now we can update the template to render a list of names. To do this we will use *ngFor as follows:

  • Loop through a list of items
  • Generte a new card for each item.

Our new template will look like this:

src / app / user-list / user-list.component.html

We have updated the template with an ul and an il with an attribute of *ngFor="let name of names" . At first, the * character and let syntax seem a bit confusing, so let’s find out:
The *ngFor syntax says that we want to use NgFor directive on this attribute . You can think of NgFor as a for loop for. The idea is that we will create a new DOM element for each item in the collection.
In the "let name of names" command. It names an array has been pointed out in UserListComponent earlier. And let name is called a reference . When we write "let name of names" it means we will iterate through each element in the names and display each local variable called name.
NgFor directive will render a li tag for each elemt found in the array names . And declare a local variable name to hold the value of the current item being iterated over. And this variable will be replaced in the paragraph Hello {{ name }} .

We do not necessarily have to name the variable name . We can write the following:

Conversely, what if we write like this?

The answer is an error because foobar not a property that exists in our component.

When reloading the browser, we will have a li tag for each string in the array.

Using the User Item Component

Remember that we created the UserItemComponent together UserItemComponent ?
Instead render out each name in UserListComponent we should use UserItemComponent as child component (Component child) – that is, instead of rendering directly text Hello and name, we should UserItemComponent specified template (and function ) for each item in the list.
To do this, we need to do 3 things:

  • Configure UserListComponent to render UserItemComponent (In template).
  • Configure UserItemComponent to accept the name variable as an input .
  • Configure UserListComponent template to pass name to UserItemComponent

Come on, let’s do it step by step!

Rendering the UserItemComponent

UserItemComponent has an app-user-item selector selector – Now, let’s try UserItemComponent that tag to the template:

src / app / user-list / user-list.component.html

Notice that I changed the text Hello and name into an app-user-item tag. Now reload your browser, to see what we see: It’s repetitive, but there’s something wrong here. With each name are displayed as “Felipe”! We need a way to pass data into the child component .
Fortunately, Angular provides a way to do this: @Input decorator.

Accepting Inputs

Remember that in the UserItemComponent , we have set this.name = 'Felipe' in the constructor. Now we need to change a bit in this component so that it accepts a value for the property name.
And here is what we need to change:

src / app / user-item / user-item.component.ts

Notice that I changed the name property to have an additional @Input decorator. We will talk more about Inputs (and even Outputs ) in the next chapter, but for now we know that this syntax allows us to pass a value from the parent template ( parent template ).
To use Input we must add it to the constant list in import .
Finally, we will not set the default value for the variable name , so we will delete that set in the constructor . So now we have an name Input . How to use it?

Passing an Input value

To pass a value to a component we use square brackets [] in the template, specifically as follows:

src / app / user-list / user-list.component.html

Notice that, on the app-user-item tag, I added a new attribute, which is: [name]="name" . In Angular when we add an attribute in brackets like [foo] – that is, we want to say, pass a value to the Input named foo in the component.
In this case, note that the name on the right is from the let name... in ngFor. If we write it like this:

The [name] is specifying the Input in the UserItemComponent . Notice that we are not passing the string “individualUserName” here and we are passing the value of individualUserName – That is the value of each element in the names array.
We will talk more about Inputs and Outputs in the next chapter. Currently, what we have done is:

  1. Repeats elements in names
  2. Create a new UserItemComponent for each element in the names
  3. UserItemComponent a value of name Input contained in UserItemComponent

And now our list names are displayed. Congratulations! Together, we have built the first Angular application with components!
Of course, this application is quite simple, and I want us to build an application with more functions, such as voting application, capable of interacting with users … However before Starting to build a new app, we will learn together about Bootstrapping in Angular.

Bootstrapping Crash Course

Every app has a main entry point .
This application is built with Angular CLI (it is built on a tool called Webpack). We run this application by calling:
ng serve
ng will find the entry point for our application in the angular.json file. Come, let’s also learn how ng identify the component that we just created.
At a high level it will look like this:

  • angular.json will specify a “main” file, in this case main.ts
  • main.ts is the entry-point of our app, and it will bootstraps application.
  • The bootstrap process will start the Angular module.
  • We use AppModule to bootstrap the application. AppModule is specified in src/app/app.module.ts
  • AppModule will specify which component will be used as top-level components. In that case, it is AppComponent
  • AppComponent has <app-user-list> in the template, and it renders the list of users.

Currently, what I want to focus on is the Angular module system: NgModule .
Angular has a strong concept of modules . When you launch an Angular app, you won’t start a component directly, instead you will create an NgModule , which will point to the component you want to load.
Take a look at the code below:

src / app / app.module.ts

The first thing we see is an @NgModule decorator. Like all decorators, this code @NgModule( ... ) will add a metadata to the class shortly after (in this case, AppModule ).
@NgModule decorator has 4 keys: declarations, imports, providers, and bootstrap

declarations

declarations indicate the components defined in this module.
And here is an important idea in Angular: “You must declare components in NgModule before you can use them in your templates.”
You can think of NgModule as a “package” and declarations will specify which components are owned by this module.
You may have noticed that when we use ng generate , the tool automatically adds components to the declarations list. The idea here is that whenever we create a new component, ng tool assumes that we want it to belong to the current NgModule .

imports

imports will describe the dependencies that this module has. We are creating a browser app, so we will import BrowserModule . If your module depends on other modules, you can list them here.

The difference between import and imports
You might be asking the question, is the difference between the class import at the beginning of the file and the imports in the module?
The short answer is that you will put something into NgModule's imports if you will use it in templates or with dependency injection . We will talk about dependency injection in the following sections.

providers

providers are used for dependency injection. Therefore, to make a service ready to be injected into our app, we will add it here.

bootstrap

bootstrap will tell Angular that when this module is used to bootstrap an app, it needs to load AppComponent first.

Over. Invite you to refer to the next article

Source: https://www.ng-book.com/2/

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