Salient Soft

Prime now use Font Awesome for icons. They do not appear to be listed in the PrimeNG documentation/showcase, but are listed in the PrimeFaces one and may therefore be found here.

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I was trying to allow a left div for a menu to have a percentage width, possibly with a fixed min-width.

I then wanted to add a right div which filled all the remaining space to the right, to form a content pane.

My initial attempts which failed were:-

1/ Float both divs left – this partly works e.g. if I gave 25% width to the left and 75% width to the right, i.e. I had to assign width. If I then gave a min-width to the left, the right div drops underneath when the min-width kicks in.

2/ Per this post here, I took the float out of the right div. Whilst it extended to fill the right hand space, it also filled the left hand space, and placing e.g. a PrimeNG toolbar in the right hand pane resulted in a mess where the height of the toolbar filled the whole height of both divs. This was all due to the interaction of the floated and non floated div – the non floated one just flowed around the left hand floated div, and its content was in fact also hiding underneath the right one. In fact the comments mention that the proposed solution in the post does not work exactly as I found.

Finally an interesting solution which did work is this post here. The right float is not floated but is set to overflow:hidden. This triggers a Block Formatting Context, which interacts with the float to fill the remaining space. The right div becomes a BFC which prevents sibling floats from intruding on them, and also prevents descendant floats from escaping. The post explains the details on this well.

This worked correctly, even when the min-width was used in conjunction with a percentage width for the left div. A plunker showing a simple example of the BFC may be found here.

In the end I abandoned this approach of rolling my own layout. I was using PrimeNG components, and PrimeNG comes with a Grid CSS layout component which does full responsive 12 column based layout. It is nestable, and adaptable automatically for different screen widths via media queries. It is also used internally for the PrimeNG components, so will play nicely with them and will be less prone to side effects. I note from the comments that Bootstrap responsive column layout does not work well with PrimeNG, so I stuck with PrimeNG as it is flexible and easy to use.

Another alternative for grid layout which is big in this area is Foundation, which is also reviewed and compared with Bootstrap here. Bootstrap may be found here. Both Foundation and Bootstrap are frameworks offering components and css/theming as well as grid layout so would likely fight with Primefaces as this post indicates. It looks like you may be able to just get the grid with Foundation by now, not sure with Bootstrap.

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I got this error when trying to build and run the primeng-quickstart-cli per the readme in the git project

E:\Dev\angular\primeng-quickstart-cli>ng build
You seem to not be depending on "@angular/core". This is an error.

E:\Dev\angular\primeng-quickstart-cli>ng serve
The "@angular/compiler-cli" package was not properly installed.
Error: The "@angular/compiler-cli" package was not properly installed.
    at Object.<anonymous> (E:\Dev\angular\primeng-quickstart-cli\node_modules\@ngtools\webpack\src\index.js:14:11)
    at Module._compile (module.js:571:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:580:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:488:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:447:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:439:3)
    at Module.require (module.js:498:17)
    at require (internal/module.js:20:19)
    at Object.<anonymous> (E:\Dev\angular\primeng-quickstart-cli\node_modules\@angular\cli\tasks\eject.js:10:19)
    at Module._compile (module.js:571:32)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:580:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:488:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:447:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:439:3)
    at Module.require (module.js:498:17)
    at require (internal/module.js:20:19)

E:\Dev\angular\primeng-quickstart-cli>

I tried upgrading angular-cli as per here, but this did not solve the problem.

Interestingly when I tried to start the alternative primeng-quickstart-webpack project using ng-serve, I got the same error as above.

However, when following the correct (and different) instructions for primeng-quickstart-webpack  as follows it worked:-

npm install

npm run start:webpack

I therefore tried to use these npm install/run commands on the primeng-quickstart-cli project but it was clearly not set up for this build/run mechanism:-

E:\Dev\angular\primeng-quickstart-cli>npm run start:webpack
npm ERR! Windows_NT 6.1.7601
npm ERR! argv "E:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\node.exe" "E:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\node_modules\\n
npm ERR! node v7.10.0
npm ERR! npm  v4.2.0

npm ERR! missing script: start:webpack
npm ERR!
npm ERR! If you need help, you may report this error at:
npm ERR!     <https://github.com/npm/npm/issues>

npm ERR! Please include the following file with any support request:
npm ERR!     C:\Users\SteveW\AppData\Roaming\npm-cache\_logs\2017-05-11T10_08_50_957Z-debug.log

At present the issue with primeng-quickstart-cli is not a blocking one – the other starter  primeng-quickstart-webpack looks preferable as it is a simple full CRUD table app whereas the other starter it a trivial one whch just outputs a message in response to a button click.

These StackOverflow posts here and here discuss the error, but I did not appear to be missing the basic config. This post might be more relevant, and advises downgrading first then re-upgrading, but it refers to angular 2 rather than 4.

I hope to learn and resolve these build issues and errors at some point soon though and gain a better understanding of what is going on/ what are the alternatives.

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Instructions as per here:-

Updating Angular CLI

If you’re using Angular CLI beta.28 or less, you need to uninstall angular-cli package. It should be done due to changing of package’s name and scope from angular-cli to @angular/cli:

npm uninstall -g angular-cli
npm uninstall --save-dev angular-cli

To update Angular CLI to a new version, you must update both the global package and your project’s local package.

Global package:

npm uninstall -g @angular/cli
npm cache clean
npm install -g @angular/cli@latest

Local project package:

rm -rf node_modules dist # use rmdir /S/Q node_modules dist in Windows Command Prompt; use rm -r -fo node_modules,dist in Windows PowerShell
npm install --save-dev @angular/cli@latest
npm install

Note that for a primeNg application I also had to reinstall the angular animations module:-

npm install @angular/animations

Failing to do this caused numerous errors on an ng serve due to the inability to reference the animations(!) :-

ERROR in E:/Dev/angular/places-admin/node_modules/@angular/platform-browser/animations/src/animation_renderer.d.ts (1,53):
Cannot find module '@angular/animations/browser'.

ERROR in E:/Dev/angular/places-admin/node_modules/@angular/platform-browser/animations/src/providers.d.ts (8,276):
Cannot find module '@angular/animations/browser'.

ERROR in Error encountered resolving symbol values statically.
Could not resolve @angular/animations/browser relative to
E:/Dev/angular/places-admin/node_modules/@angular/platform-browser/animations/index.d.ts.,
resolving symbol ?e in
E:/Dev/angular/places-admin/node_modules/@angular/platform-browser/animations/index.d.ts,
resolving symbol BrowserAnimationsModule in
E:/Dev/angular/places-admin/node_modules/@angular/platform-browser/animations/index.d.ts,
resolving symbol BrowserAnimationsModule in
E:/Dev/angular/places-admin/node_modules/@angular/platform-browser/animations/index.d.ts

ERROR in ./~/@angular/platform-browser/@angular/platform-browser/animations.es5.js

Module not found: Error:
Can't resolve '@angular/animations/browser' in
'E:\Dev\angular\places-admin\node_modules\@angular\platform-browser\@angular\platform-browser'
@ ./~/@angular/platform-browser/@angular/platform-browser/animations.es5.js 13:0-249
@ ./src/app/app.module.ts
@ ./src/main.ts
@ multi webpack-dev-server/client?
http://localhost:4200 ./src/main.ts

ERROR in ./~/primeng/components/accordion/accordion.js
Module not found: Error:
Can't resolve '@angular/animations' in
'E:\Dev\angular\places-admin\node_modules\primeng\components\accordion'
@ ./~/primeng/components/accordion/accordion.js 13:19-49
@ ./~/primeng/primeng.js
@ ./src/app/app.module.ts
@ ./src/main.ts
@ multi webpack-dev-server/client?
http://localhost:4200 ./src/main.ts

ERROR in ./~/primeng/components/calendar/calendar.js
Module not found: Error:
Can't resolve '@angular/animations' in
'E:\Dev\angular\places-admin\node_modules\primeng\components\calendar'
@ ./~/primeng/components/calendar/calendar.js 13:19-49
@ ./~/primeng/primeng.js
@ ./src/app/app.module.ts
@ ./src/main.ts
@ multi webpack-dev-server/client?
http://localhost:4200 ./src/main.ts

ERROR in ./~/primeng/components/confirmdialog/confirmdialog.js
Module not found: Error:
Can't resolve '@angular/animations' in
'E:\Dev\angular\places-admin\node_modules\primeng\components\confirmdialog'
@ ./~/primeng/components/confirmdialog/confirmdialog.js 13:19-49
@ ./~/primeng/primeng.js
@ ./src/app/app.module.ts
@ ./src/main.ts
@ multi webpack-dev-server/client?
http://localhost:4200 ./src/main.ts

 
It appeared that I did not need to reinstall primeng via npm install primeng –save. In fact although it initially ran without, I did reinstall this too as well as the animations.

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Update 30/5/2017

Re the comment below on the stylesheet link tags not being honoured in index.html, it may still be ok to do this when the css is somewhere under the assets folder, as webpack loads these. I hit this on the Learning Tree angular course in an exercise, course 2324 ex 2.1, and moving a css folder from the src level to under the assets folder solved the problem – prior to this I was getting net errors on all the stylesheets (interestingly the exercise was originally set up wrong, which proved useful when diagnosing this issue) . This therefore may still be an alternative in some cases to using angular-cli.json.

Original Post

This is pretty much covered here, but salient points/commands as follows:-

ng new places-admin –style=scss
cd places-admin
npm install primeng –save
npm install @angular/animations
npm install font-awesome –save
ng serve

• Note the use of –style=scss as the default is plain css.
• angular animations are used for angular 4
• font awesome is used and needs to be both installed as above and added as a dependency in package.json along with primeng (this was already done automatically when I looked).
• Note that you need to import either BrowserAnimationsModule or NoopAnimationsModule in addition to BrowserModule – the post above mentions this but does not actually do it in the sample code:-

import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import {BrowserAnimationsModule} from '@angular/platform-browser/animations';
...

@NgModule({
declarations: [
…
],
imports: [
BrowserModule,
BrowserAnimationsModule,
FormsModule,
HttpModule
],
providers: [],
bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule { }

Styles configuration issue

Per the setup instructions above I initially just configured the style sheets with link tags in index.html:-

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/node_modules/primeng/resources/themes/omega/theme.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/node_modules/primeng/resources/primeng.min.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="YOUR_PATH/font-awesome.min.css" />

 

When I did this alone, the style sheets would not resolve at run time. Per some online post suggestions I tried various alternative path prefixes such as “/node_modules”, “./node_modules”, and “../node_modules” but none would resolve. When I looked in the chrome inspector I was getting 404s on all the style sheet loads. I checked the file system and all the referenced files were present under node_modules, but they were just not available to the web server/were not being served. It appears that this is a consequence of the way that angular-cli and webpack package up the application. I then tried adding the style references specifically to .angular-cli.json as per the instructions :-

"styles": [
  "../node_modules/primeng/resources/primeng.min.css",
  "../node_modules/primeng/resources/themes/omega/theme.css",
  "../node_modules/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.min.css",
  //...
],

This worked and the styles/theming did resolve correctly. In fact, the static link references were not used at all and could be removed.

When examining components which used the css with the Chrome inspector, the css rules were being taken from style blocks directly, so this was clearly a packaging issue.

For dynamic theme switching, it may therefore be necessary to move the themes under the app resources and use a dynamically changed <link> tag or similar to select the target theme – this is the way that the PrimeNG Showcase does its theme switching, and there is no evidence at present of any other theme switcher component.

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NativeScript is the newer kid on the block – some of its key differences are as follows:-

1. NativeScript uses its own XML based element tags which are compiled to actual native elements in the deployed application.
2. This means that your view templates do not use HTML or ‘normal’ css – the elements and attributes are different and therefore there is a learning curve here as you have to learn all the new markup.
3. Native feature access such as cameras etc. is easier with NativeScript – with Ionic, often plugins for Cordova are needed, however this appears set to improve fairly soon.
4. You still develop with Javascript or TypeScript, and you can use Angular for development. However, I am not clear on how all the dynamic features/specific attributes of Angular which target the HTML DOM will fit in and work with the NativeScript XML elements – I would expect there to be some compromises here on what you can do. NativeScript does support dynamic creation of elements, but I would not expect all this to work in the same way as adding dynamic html/changing innerHTML with Angular for example.
5. For development testing, you use an Android or IOS emulator e.g. under Windows. For android debugging, you can attach the Chrome developer tools to debug.
6. From the perspective of being a web developer, it looks like Ionic is easier and more familiar in use.
7. The key feature with NativeScript is that it does give you true native components, and the apps run faster as they are native. However the app size for download/install is also much larger.
8. It does correctly claim to support all its target platforms from a single code base – note that all the targets run native applications.
9. Therefore note that it does not create a web app of any kind. Therefore when support for Windows comes out sometime soon, this will be a native application running on Windows.

There are a number of pros and cons and no shortage of discussion on line, and the following posts do some in-depth comparison on this:-

http://pointdeveloper.com/category/nativescript/

http://pointdeveloper.com/nativescript-vs-ionic-framework-pros-cons/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40819520/hybrid-app-ionic-vs-nativescript

http://www.discoversdk.com/blog/ionic-2-vs-reactnative-vs-nativescript

https://www.thepolyglotdeveloper.com/2015/11/nativescript-vs-ionic-framework-should-you-switch/

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The landscape in this regard is pretty complex with a number of choices out there.

This StackOverflow post discusses the functionality and pros/cons of the alternatives and is helpful in gaining an idea of what they all actually do!

I was keen to pick tools that met my needs, especially re the ability to build apps from separate shared components, but did not want to over complicate things by using tools that I did not really need.

My conclusion from the above and all the comments is that for the moment all my need can be met by just sticking with Webpack (in conjunction with Angular CLI and Ionic CLI), and not venturing to use tools such as Gulp on top as I don’t really need to.

This is good as webpack is the standard for Angular and Ionic.

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Update 12/5/2017

Note that there are issues when trying to use the standard themes loaded by the PrimeNG installation, which reside under node_modules. Basically, the traditional use of the link tag did not work even though the style files were present.  This appears to be an issue relating to how the application is packaged and served.

See this post in the ‘Styles configuration issue’ near the end for details and resolution on this problem.

Original Post

This is handled in much the same way as it was in JSF – a directory for each theme holds its scss and css files.

Normally these are bundled in as part of an npm installation of primeng, so the themes end up under node_modules\primeng\resources\themes, but this may differ if you have your own custom themes.

The PrimeNG showcase for example does not use an npm install of primeng, but declares its own primeng package as it contains everything. It therefore puts the themes under resource\themes. See this post for issues with this re getting the showcase to work locally.

The showcase is instructive as a simple example of how to switch themes – at present there does not appear to be a theme switcher/manager component available.

The basic style link tag which picks up a theme is in index.html:-

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="resources/themes/omega/theme.css">

The following javascript function modifies this dynamically as themes are selected:-

var DemoApp = {

    changeTheme: function(event, element) {
        var theme = $(element).data("theme"),
        themeLink = $('link[href$="theme.css"]'),
        newThemeURL =  'resources/themes/' + theme + '/theme.css';

        themeLink.attr('href', newThemeURL);
        event.preventDefault();
    }  
};

The following markup is used for theme selection, based on a hard coded list of the themes available:-

<span class="topbar-link" id="themeSwitcher"
      (mouseenter)="themesVisible = true" (mouseleave)="themesVisible = false">
    <img src="showcase/resources/images/themeswitcher.svg" />
    <span>Themes</span>
    <div id="GlobalThemeSwitcher" [style.display]="themesVisible ? 'block' : 'none'" style="margin-top:10px">
        <span>Premium Templates</span>
        <a href="http://www.primefaces.org/layouts/ultima-ng">
            <img src="showcase/resources/images/themeswitcher-ultima.png" alt="Ultima Template">
            <span class="ui-text">Ultima</span></a>
        <a href="http://www.primefaces.org/layouts/barcelona-ng">
            <img src="showcase/resources/images/themeswitcher-barcelona.png" alt="Barcelona Template">
            <span class="ui-text">Barcelona</span></a>
        <a href="http://www.primefaces.org/layouts/morpheus-ng">
            <img src="showcase/resources/images/themeswitcher-morpheus.png" alt="Morpheus Template">
            <span class="ui-text">Morpheus</span></a>
        <a href="http://www.primefaces.org/layouts/atlantis-ng">
            <img src="showcase/resources/images/themeswitcher-atlantis.png" alt="Atlantis Template">
            <span class="ui-text">Atlantis</span></a>
        <a href="http://www.primefaces.org/layouts/poseidon-ng">
            <img src="showcase/resources/images/themeswitcher-poseidon.png" alt="Poseidon Template">
            <span class="ui-text">Poseidon</span></a>
        <a href="http://www.primefaces.org/layouts/omega-ng">
            <img src="showcase/resources/images/themeswitcher-omega.png" alt="Omega Template">
            <span class="ui-text">Omega</span></a>
        <span>Free Themes</span>
        <a href="#" data-theme="omega" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Omega</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="bootstrap" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Bootstrap</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="cupertino" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Cupertino</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="cruze" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Cruze</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="darkness" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Darkness</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="flick" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Flick</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="home" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Home</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="kasper" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Kasper</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="lightness" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Lightness</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="ludvig" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Ludvig</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="pepper-grinder" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Pepper-Grinder</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="redmond" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Redmond</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="rocket" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Rocket</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="south-street" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">South-Street</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="start" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Start</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="trontastic" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Trontastic</span></a>
        <a href="#" data-theme="voclain" onclick="DemoApp.changeTheme(event, this)">
            <span class="ui-text">Voclain</span></a>
    </div>
</span>

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With Angular, the component objects are automatically created and associated with their corresponding elements in the template.

This raises the question then – if you want to refer to a child object from a parent component, how do you do it? There may be multiple child components of the same time in the parent component, so how do you get a reference to a specific one?

As a contrast, when using JSF for example to refer to child component code, the parent managed bean (= component object in Angular) is actually responsible for declaring the managed bean objects for its children. On the page, the child component element will typically have a specific e.g. controller attribute where the managed bean for that child is passed in, e.g. as <child controller=#{controller.child}>…  where controller.child  refers to the child property of the parent managed bean. In this way, unlike Angular, the object hierarchy is explicitly declared in the code.

In Angular, there are a number  of ways to do this, but in the end they all come down to using reference information from a particular template element to direct which object is required.

It is instructive to read the whole section on Angular template syntax in the Angular docs, which includes all the binding techniques.

1/ Passing an element reference in a method call from the template

<ion-auto-complete id="location-search" #locationSearch [dataProvider]="locationsAutoCompleteService"
                   (itemSelected)="onItemClicked($event, locationSearch)"></ion-auto-complete>

In this case, (itemSelected)="onItemClicked($event, locationSearch)" is passing the element reference #locationSearch as the second argument to onItemClicked. This passes the reference to the component object for  <ion-auto-complete>. (Note that in this case the first argument, $event, is the actual location object that was clicked in an autocomplete list).

2/ Using the @ViewChild decorator in the parent class, passing it a child reference used in the template

export class AutoCompleteComponent {

  @Input() public dataProvider:   any;
  @Output() public itemSelected:  EventEmitter<any>;
  @ViewChild(Searchbar) searchBar: Searchbar;

In this case, the component only contains a single searchbar, so using a class reference is not ambiguous. If there were multiples, the first one would be taken. You can inject references to multiple children via @ViewChildren if there is more than one present – this gives you access to an array of them.

Where you want to use a reference to a specific element, you can use @ViewChild with an element reference, e.g. in 1/ above you would use  #locationSearch to inject a referent to the <ion-auto-complete #locationSearch > element as follows:-

@ViewChild(‘#locationSearch’) searchBar: Searchbar;

3/ Another related technique is to make a method call in the template e.g. in an event call, using an element reference to another element in the component. This is detailed here. Note that <child-component #f contains the #f element reference, and the inc() method on the #f element is called from the button click event using <button (click)=”f.inc()”>

@Component({
    selector: 'child-component',
    inputs: ['bar'],
    template: `"{{ bar }}" in child, counter  {{ n }}`
})
class ChildComponent{
    constructor () {
        this.n = 0;
    }
    inc () {
        this.n++;
    }
}

@Component({
    selector: 'my-app',
    template: `
        <child-component #f [bar]="bar"></child-component><br>
        <button (click)="f.inc()">call child func</button>
        <button (click)="bar = 'different'">change parent var</button>
    `,
    directives: [ChildComponent]
})
class AppComponent {
    constructor () {
        this.bar = 'parent var';
    }
}

bootstrap(AppComponent);  

There is a working plunker for the above example here.

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In my case the log had grown to nearly 1GB, and there does not appear to be any log rotation set up by default!

It turns out that this will occur if you have not configured the node after installation – either for single node operation, or as a cluster.

This can easily be done via the configuration option in Fauxton, and at the same time it allows you to set credentials for the admin account.

Doing this prevented the log spamming and log growth was then minimal.

This post here discusses the issue.

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