So this is the update to the earlier example, ditching the directive in favor of just simple Angular templating with ngOption and ngRepeat. The point here is to change both the UI and the object being acted upon in a very simple way: Use one dynamic data-set to control another dynamic data-set.
Previous Example:
Here I show how you can use a directive to generate form elements by using dynamic scope references. Its not amazing and probably not even the best way to do this, but it works.
This is a middle stage of an example I'll post later of switching the UI completely to set options on different objects.
A neat bit of Mustache implementation that I'd not really used before but needed: Mustache allows you to access higher contexts by reference, as long as there is not a conflict. A very clean solution unless you have values with a conflicting names, in which case the current context takes precedence.
Properly using Values and Constants in AngularJS can be really powerful, but AngularJS does have one annoyance with Values and Constants: if you want to keep values bundled together (for readability), its hard to have them also reference each other. Self-executing code to the rescue: just build up the value and return it from the function automatically.
AngularJS has a really poor handling of timeouts, at least for complex HTTP calls. You can provide a timeout in milliseconds, but if the request does time out, you just get a cancelled request. Now this might be fine for simple situations, but when you have CORS Ajax calls, you end up not being able to tell a timeout from a CORS request failure (at least not easily). This can be handled by switching to setting the timeout with a Promise instead. This code shows how to use a promise for your timeout in AngularJS to get clear error messages.
More in my series showing how to do small things with AngularJS. This time its controlling masking layers "the Angular way" but using ng-class to apply the masking layer. The CSS code is largely just your bog standard masking layer code with a centered alert box, but I've added a CSS3 animation for the opacity to make it fade in and out.
I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.