JQuery Mobile Angular Adapter

Description

Integration between jquery mobile and angular.js. Needed as jquery mobile enhances the pages with new elements and styles and so does angular. Another reason is that jquery mobile only enhances pages when they are navigated to, and not all at once, as angular does in autoinit mode.

Automatically refreshs the jquery mobile widgets when the corresponding values in angular change. E.g. the select tag is enhanced by jquery mobile, and if someone changes it's value programmatically, the refresh-function needs to be called. This also applies to the disabled attribute. The integration between jquery mobile and angular watches for such changes in the model and automatically calls the refresh function.

Finally provides special enhancements useful for mobile applications.

Sample

See project phonecat-mobile.

Limitations

This deactivates angular's feature to change urls via the $browser or $location services. This was needed as angular's url handling is incompatibly with jquery mobile and leads to unwanted navigations.

Usage

Include this adapter after angular and jquery mobile (see below).

ATTENTION: Do NOT use the autobind mode of angular!

<html xmlns:ng="http://angularjs.org" xmlns:ngm="http://jqm-angularjs.org">
<head>
    <title>MobileToys</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="lib/jquery.mobile-1.0b1-oc1.css"/>
    <script src="lib/jquery-1.6.1.js"></script>
    <script src="lib/jquery.mobile-1.0b1-oc1.js"></script>
    <script src="lib/angular-0.9.15.js"></script>
    <script src="lib/jquery-mobile-angular-adapter.js"></script>
</head>

Build

The build is done using maven and requirejs.

mvn clean package -Pbuild: This will create a new version of the adapter and put it into /compiled.

The build also creates a standalone library including jquery, jquery-mobile and angular. If you want to do something during the initialization of jquery-mobile, use the following callback: window.mobileinit = function() { ... }

Please install the latest version of the maven plugin brew. This project provides a snapshot release in /localrepo.

Running the tests

mvn clean integration-test -Ptest: This will do a build and execute the tests using js-test-driver. The browser that is used can be specified in the pom.xml.
mvn clean package jetty:run: This will start a webserver under localhost:8080/jqmng. The unit-tests can be run via the url localhost:8080/jqmng/UnitSpecRunner.html The ui-tests can be run via the url localhost:8080/jqmng/UiSpecRunner.html

Directory layout

This follows the usual maven directory layout:

src/main/webapp: The production code
src/test/webapp: The test code
compiled: The result of the javascript compilation

Scopes

The adapter creates a global scope by compiling just down until the body tag and then stopping there. Any controller associated to the body tag will be part of the global scope.

Every page of jquery mobile gets a separate scope. The $eval of the global scope only evaluates the currently active page, so there is no performance interaction between pages.

For communicating between the pages,the global scope or the onActivate callbacks below may be used.

The global scope can be access via the function $.mobile.globalScope or via $("body").scope(). However, please use this.$root to access the global scope in your code. This simplifies testing!

Callbacks for page changes

On page change, the integration looks for a method named onPassivate in the current page scope. If the function exists it will be called with the scope of the new page as parameter. Afterwards, the function onActivate is searched for on the new scope and called with the old scope as parameter. By this, pages can commuicate with each other very easily.

Note that for creating a function in a scope just assign a controller for that page, e.g. <div data-role="page" ng:controller="MyController">.

Widgets, Directives and Services

Directive ngm:click(handler)

Special click handler that integrates with jquery mobile's vclick event and by this also reacts to touches. Also see ngm:event for the general case of binding a handler to events.

Usage: E.g. <a href="#" ngm:click="myFn()">

Directive ngm:event(event1:handler1,event2:handler2,...)

General event handler that integrates with jquery events, and also with jquery mobile events. The value of the attribute has the syntax <events>:<function expression>,.... The events part may contain one or more events (see jQuery bind function). There may be more than one events/function pair in the expression, separated by a komma.

Usage: E.g. <a href="#" ngm:event="swiperight:myFn()">

Attribute Widget @ngm:if

The attribute widget @ngm:if allows to add/remove an element to/from the dom, depending on an expression. This is especially useful at places where we cannot insert an ng:switch into the dom. E.g. jquery mobile does not allow elements between an ul and an li element.

Usage: E.g. <div ngm:if="myFlag">asdfasdf</div>

Directive ngm:enterkey(handler)

Special click handler that fires when the enter key is pressed.

Usage: E.g. <input type="submit" ngm:enterkey="myFn()">

Directive ngm:fadein

For smooth fadings between ngm:if changes, there is also the directive ngm:fadein. This specifies that the display of the coresponding element should be shown via a transition lasting a defined amount of milliseconds (the value of the attribute).

Usage: E.g. <div ngm:fadein="700">asdf</div>

Service $activePage

Service to access and change the current page. A call without parameters returns the current page id, a call with parameters changes the current page.

Parameters (see $.mobile.changePage)

pageId: Id of page to navigate to. The special page id "back" navigates back.
transition (optional): Transition to be used.
reverse (optional): If the transition should be executed in reverse style

Usage: E.g. $activePage('page2')

Service $waitdialog

The service $waitdialog allows the access to the jquery mobile wait dialog. It provides the following functions:

show(msg, callback): Opens the wait dialog and shows the given message (if existing). If the user clicks on the wait dialog the given callback is called. This can be called even if the dialog is currently showing. It will the change the message and revert back to the last message when the hide function is called.
hide(): Restores the dialog state before the show function was called.
waitFor(promise, msg): Shows the dialog as long as the given promise runs. Shows the given message if defined.
waitForWithCancel(promise, cancelData, msg): Same as above, but rejects the promise with the given cancelData when the user clicks on the wait dialog.

Default messages are:

$.mobile.loadingMessageWithCancel: for waitForWithCancel
$.mobile.loadingMessage: for all other cases

Function angular.Object.iff / $iff

Every expression can now use the function $iff as a ternary operator: $iff(test, trueCase, falseCase) will return the trueCase if the test is truthy and the falseCase otherwise.

Paging for lists

Lists can be paged in the sense that more entries can be additionally loaded. By "loading" we mean the display of a sublist of a list that is already fully loaded in JavaScript. This is useful, as the main performance problems result from DOM operations, which can be reduced with this paging mechanism.

To implement this paging mechaism, we extend the angular array type with the folling function: angular.Array.paged(array[,filterExpr[,orderByExpr]]):

This returns the subarray of the given filtered and ordered array with the currently loaded pages. The default page size is defined by $.mobile.defaultListPageSize. It can be overwritten by the property pageSize on arrays. For the filtering and sorting see the angular.Array.filter and angular.Array.orderBy.

The resulting list provides the following functions:

hasMorePages(): Returns a boolean indicating if there are more pages that can be loaded.
loadNextPage(): Loads the next page from the list that was given to angular.Array.paged.

Note that this will cache the result of two calls until the next eval cycle or a change to the filter or orderBy arguments.

As angular instruments all lists in expressions automatically with the functions form the angular.Array namespace, the function paged can directly be used in all angular expressions, with a $ as prefix. The following example shows an example for a paged list for the data in the variable myList:

<ul data-role="listview">
    <li ng:repeat="item in list.$paged()">{{item}}</li>
    <li ngm:if="list.$paged().hasMorePages()">
        <a href="#" ngm:click="list.$paged().loadNextPage()">Load more</a>
     </li>
</ul>

athurow / jquery-mobile-angular-adapter