angular-meteor

Angular and Meteor, so happy together

angular-meteor is a meteor package that allows you to easily build meteor applications with an angular front end. It bridges the reactivity of meteor with the binding of angular.

Compatibility

Version 0.3.2 and later has been tested with Meteor 1.0

Quick start

1. Install Meteor curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh
2. Create a new meteor app using meteor create myapp or navigate to the root of your existing app.
3. Install angular-meteor meteor add superchris:angular-meteor

Bootstrapping your module

With Meteor, you lose ng-app. It's not a big deal though. Make a lib/app.(coffee | js) that bootstraps and depends on ngMeteor:

    angular.module "app", ["ngMeteor", "ngRoute"]

    Meteor.startup ->
      angular.bootstrap(document, ["app"])

Angular expressions

You'll need to use [[]] instead of {{}} in your angular expressions. Blaze, meteor's template engine, takes over {{}} and I have not yet found a way around this. For example:

    <div>
        <label>Name:</label>
        <input type="text" ng-model="yourName" placeholder="Enter a name here">
        <hr>
        <h1>Hello [[yourName]]!</h1>
    </div>

Templates

Your templates with live in the templates folder of your Meteor app. They will need to be wrapped with a template element with a name attribute. This name attribute is what you will use to refer to your template in routes, directives, etc.

<template name="recipe.html">
  <div id="recipe_view">
    <dl>
      <dt>[[recipe.title]]</dt>
      <dd>[[recipe.description]]</dd>
      <dd>[[category.name]]</dd>
    </dl>
    <p>
      Ingredients:
      <ul>
        <li ng-repeat="ingredient in recipe.ingredients">[[ingredient.name]]</li>
      </ul>
    </p>
    <a href="#recipes/[[recipe._id]]/edit">Edit</a>
  </div>
</template>

Services

ngMeteor gives you two services you'll use in your app to talk to Meteor from Angular: $collection and $user

$collection

ngMeteor provides an AngularJS service called $collection, which is a wrapper for Meteor collections to enable reactivity within AngularJS. The $collection service no longer subscribes to a publisher function automatically, so you must explicitly subscribe to a publisher function before calling the $collection service.

$collection(collection, selector, options)

Arguments	Type	Description	Required
collection	Meteor Collection Object	The Meteor Collection	Yes
selector	Mongo Selector (Object or String)	Same as Meteor Collection Find	No
options	Object	Same as Meteor Collection Find	No

The $collection service only has the following methods

bind - used to bind the collection to an Angular model so that you can use it in your scope:

bind(scope, model, auto)

Arguments	Type	Description	Required	Default
scope	Scope	The scope the collection will be bound to.	Yes
model	String	The model the collection will be bound to.	Yes
auto	Boolean	By default, changes in the model will not automatically update the collection. However if set to true, changes in the client will be automatically propagated back to the collection. A deep watch is created when this is set to true, which sill degrade performance.	No	false

Once a collection has been bound using the bind method, the model will have access to the following methods for upserting/removing objects in the collection. If the auto argument as been set to true, then the user will not need to call these methods because these methods will be called automatically whenever the model changes.

Method	Argument	Type	Description
save(docs)	docs	Object or Array of Objects	Upsert an object into the collection. If no argument is passed, all the objects in the model to the collection will be upserted.
remove(keys)	keys	_id String or Array of _id Strings	Removes an object from the collection. If no argument is passed, all the objects in the collection will be removed.

paginate - Like bind, but paginates the collection:

paginate(scope, model)

Arguments	Type	Description	Required	Default
scope	Scope	The scope the collection will be bound to.	Yes
model	String	The model the collection will be bound to.	Yes

Paginate will use the following scope properties to implement pagination:

Property	Type	Description	Required	Default
perPage	Number	The numer of items on each page
page	Number	The current page number (1 based). A $watch is setup to refetch the collection on change	Yes

bindOne - used to bind the a single model to your scope:

bind(scope, model, id)

Arguments	Type	Description	Required	Default
scope	Scope	The scope the model will be bound to.	Yes
model	String	The scope property the model will be bound to.	Yes
id	String	The id used to look up the model from the collection	Yes

bindOneAssociation - used to bind the a related model to your scope:

bind(scope, model, expression)

Arguments	Type	Description	Required	Default
scope	Scope	The scope the model will be bound to.	Yes
model	String	The scope property the model will be bound to.	Yes
association	String	An angular expression. A $watch will be added and it will be used to lookup the related model	Yes

$user

$user only has one method, bind:

bind - used to bind Meteor.user to an Angular model so that you can use it in your scope:

bind(scope, model)

Arguments	Type	Description	Required	Default
scope	Scope	The scope the user will be bound to.	Yes
model	String	The model the user will be bound to.	Yes

Example apps

• Cookbook
• Kanban Board

Acknowledgement

This project started as ngMeteor, a pre-0.9 meteorite package. I've updated it for Meteor 1.0 and added several features.