Angular Development Tutorials

Angular Angular CDK Angular Components

Angular CDK: Copy to Clipboard

June 01, 2024

When we build things with Angular, we often find ourselves needing to do stuff that we see on the web or in other applications every day. Like copying text to the clipboard for example. Something like that could take a little work to pull off if we were creating it from scratch. But one of the benefits of working with a framework like angular is that many of these common application concepts have already been figured out for us and made available by either the framework itself or, in this case the Component Dev Kit (a.k.a., CDK). So, in this example we’ll see just how easy this task is thanks to the CDK. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Using @HostBinding with Signals

May 25, 2024

If you’re building apps with Angular, you’re probably using signals more and more every day. This can definitely be a challenge at times because it’s such a different way of working. And, there are things that just don’t quite work with signals yet, like @HostBinding for example. Well in this post, I’m going to demonstrate how we can actually use the @HostBinding decorator with signals, pretty easily right now even though the decorator was not originally built to support them directly. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Angular Animations: Disable/Enable Animations

May 19, 2024

I’m willing to bet, that if you’ve spent very much time working with Angular animations, you’ve had the need or desire to disable them for one reason or another. Something that I encounter quite a bit are animations that run on component initialization. I may only expect them to run when an interaction occurs, or when data changes, or something along those lines. I don’t expect them to run on initialization, but they do anyway. Well, this is something that I’m going to show you how to fix in this post. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Angular Animations: Creating Reusable Animations!

May 11, 2024

As an Angular application grows over time, you probably find that you constantly need to refactor things so that shared concepts, logic, behavior, etcetera can be reused. You build things, then later down the road, you build something that needs to do something similar and now you want to breakout that concept so that it can be shared right? Well, animations in Angular are the same. Once you start building and using them, you probably find that you need to use them in multiple components. Well, in this post I’ll show you how to do this. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Angular Animations: Adding Flexibility with Params!

May 04, 2024

When working with Angular animations, have you ever found yourself needing to provide custom configurations to a specific animation? Like, what if you have something that uses a next button and you want to animate to the right in that case, but then you also have a previous button, in which case you want to animate to the left instead? Well, if you didn’t know this already, this is totally doable with Angular animation options and the params object specifically. And in this post, I’ll show you exactly how to set them up, and use them. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Adding Native Fallback Content for Slots in Angular Components

April 26, 2024

When building Angular components, have you ever found yourself looking for a way to provide fallback content for projected content slots using the ng-content element? If so, you’ve probably been able to find some work arounds to do it but, they’re probably not something you really want to do. It would be better if this concept was built-in to the framework, right? Well, this is actually happening in the latest versions of angular. In this post I’ll show you exactly how it works. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Signal Queries: Angular viewChild() and contentChild() Functions

April 20, 2024

If you work in Angular and haven’t heard yet, many things are in the process of switching away from decorators over to signals. I’ve already shown you how component or directive inputs have changed over from the @Input decorator to signals with the input() function. In this post we’ll take a look at how we can convert the @ViewChild and @ContentChild decorators over to signals with the viewChild() and contentChild() functions. We’ll take an example application that I previously created for a demo about the @ViewChild and @ContentChild decorators, and we’ll switch them over to the new signal functions producing the same end result. Ok, let’s get to it!

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Replacing Static Inputs with the Host Attribute Token

April 13, 2024

If you build things with Angular, you probably already know that you need to keep up with the framework as it evolves over time. Well, in this post, I’m going to help you do just that. We’re going to take a look at the new HostAttributeToken injection token and why you may want to use it. In this post we’ll use an example of an existing button component with inputs and we’ll replace them with the inject() function and the HostAttributeToken class. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Converting Observables to Signals in Angular

April 07, 2024

Signals are changing the way we do many things in Angular. You’ve likely encountered Observables if you’ve worked in the framework for very long. They’re a pretty handy way to stream values emitted over time to subscribers providing a way to react to these events as needed. But often when using them, we also need to trigger Change Detection in order to properly update items within views. With Signals, Observables are not being replaced, they still have use cases, but we can actually transform them into signals when needed. This can help with Change Detection and can often simplify the code overall. In this post we’ll convert a couple of Observables from an existing example over to Signals. Alright, let’s check it out.

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Angular Animations: Animating to an Unknown Height

March 29, 2024

Have you ever tried to animate an element to an unknown height with CSS alone? If so, you’ve probably found that it’s not as easy as it seems. To animate a CSS height, you need to animate to a specific value, one hundred percent and auto both won’t work. You can transition max-height but this means that you probably need to use a random arbitrary value that may not work in all cases. It’s just weird and may not even work depending on what you’re trying to do. Well, this is something that is available with Angular animations. In this post, I’ll show you how. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Signal-Based Inputs and the Output Function

March 24, 2024

In newer versions of Angular, a pretty significant change is coming with Signals. If you work with Angular and haven’t heard about them yet, you’re in the right place. In this post you’ll learn what they are, at a high level, and you’ll learn how to use the new signal-based inputs along with the new output function in components. We’re going to take a look at an example using the existing @Input and @Output decorators and we’ll convert it over to signals and the output function. I’ve been using signals a lot lately and I can assure you, It’s a change. Definitely a different way of thinking. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Angular Animations: Animating Multiple Items in Parallel

March 15, 2024

If you’ve spent any time creating animations in Angular, you may have noticed that the animations added within component metadata run sequentially. Meaning, they’ll run in the order they are added within the array. Well, sometimes this works fine, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, we need multiple animations to run in parallel to orchestrate them properly. Well, good news for us, Angular has a solution for this. In this post I’ll show you why, and I’ll show how you can animate things in parallel. Alright, let’s get to it.

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Angular Animations: Start and Done Events

March 08, 2024

When did you last need use an animation feature in your application? It’s something you probably do on a regular basis, if not daily. With Angular, we have a powerful animation framework that we can leverage to do all sorts of crazy things. Sometimes, when using these animation features, we need to do things when the animation starts, or when it ends, or both. Well, good news for us – we have this ability in Angular.

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Angular Animations Tutorial: Querying and Staggering Items

March 01, 2024

I work in Angular every day and I build things that need to be animated or transitioned when interacted with. And, because of this, I’m thankful for the Animations module. There are so many useful features available that make life much easier. We’re going to look at two of these features in this post. First, we’re going to use the query() function to find and animate several items at once. Then, we’ll use the stagger() function to create a delay between the animations running on each of these items. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Angular Animations: Keyframe Animations

February 23, 2024

As you probably already know, when you build apps today, you’ll likely need to use animations and transitions to enhance the UI where possible. With Angular’s animation framework we have access to some pretty powerful features which allow us to do things that may not be possible with CSS alone. In this post we’re going to look at a little, fun and crazy example using the Angular keyframes() animation function. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Angular Animations: Enter and Leave

February 16, 2024

When building things with Angular have you ever found yourself with the need to animate mark-up as it physically enters and leaves the DOM? This isn’t possible right? Actually, it is. In Angular we have access to a powerful animation framework. It’s packed with many features that just aren’t possible, at least at the moment, with CSS by itself. In this post we’re going to dive into one such feature, the ability to animate mark-up as it’s added and removed from the document with the :enter and :leave aliases. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Angular Animations: Learn the Basics

February 09, 2024

When you build stuff in Angular, you probably pretty quickly discover that you want to add animations and transitions. They are an important aspect to any application now-a-days right? They help make the overall user experience feel nicer and can help to make it more intuitive too. Many times, we can use CSS to handle these animations, but Angular has a powerful animation framework baked right in that allows us to do a lot more than what we can with plain ol’ CSS. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Angular CDK Overlay: Adding Accessibility Features

February 02, 2024

When creating a modal or pop-up in an Angular application, accessibility can be easy to overlook. If you’re developing an app but you’re able to see, hear, and easily access and use different devices, it’s probably not top of mind for you. But it’s important. Our goal should be to make our apps available to as many people as possible. Making them accessible helps do just that. In this post, we’ll work on an existing demo application that we’ve created over several posts focused on the Angular CDK Overlay. We’ll take the example and make it accessible using ARIA roles and attributes, managing focus, and adding proper keyboard functionality. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Angular CDK Overlay: Adding Animations

January 26, 2024

When using the Angular CDK Overlay module, you will likely want to transition the opening and closing of the overlay content. It’s something that seems like it should be pretty easy and straightforward but it’s actually a little tricky. It can’t really be transitioned with CSS only because it’s markup that gets added into and removed from the document. It’s not a simple style or class change. We need to leverage Angular animations to make it work well. In this post I’ll show you why and I’ll show you how to make animations work for your overlays. Alright, let’s get to it!

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Angular CDK Overlay: Scroll Strategies

January 19, 2024

In the Angular CDK there are a lot of cool, exciting, and helpful features. And the Overlay Module is one of the most powerful. It’s used to create things like dialogs, tooltips, menus, custom dropdowns and more. I’ve already created a couple of posts on the Overlay Module, one where I cover the basics of setting them up, and another where I demonstrate different ways that they can be positioned within the viewport. If you’re unfamiliar with these concepts and haven’t read those, you should do that before rreading this one because we will build off the examples that we created in them. Here, we’ll be focused on how we want an overlay to react when scrolling the container it’s positioned within.