Its my Code Blog

Creating an AngularJS pulse directive

January 06, 2016

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Using animations to alert the user to value changes

When highlighting to the user a change of a value on a page with a noisy layout you are faced with two possibilities, either use a colour to highlight the change or add an animation to emphasize the transition between the initial value and the new value.

Using a colour can add to visual noise on page if the change in value is not crucial to the overall user experience, you may course want a value highlighted in red if a limit has been reached. If you want draw attention value changing but not the significance of the value then an animation can be effective.

One of the animations types we will explore is a CSS pulse animation.

Pulse CSS with keyframes

The pulse animation will take the form of 3d scaling up the chosen element by 25% at the halfway point in the animation and then gradually transforming the element back to its initial state at the end of the animation. CSS3 us allows to use keyframes to specify the points in time at which we wish our effects to have taken place

Keyframes are steps in your animation that allow you define the stages of the transformation being specified, creating a smoother animation.

.pulse {
  animation: pulse 1s infinite;
  animation-duration: 1s;
  animation-play-state: running;
  animation-iteration-count: 1;
}

@keyframes pulse {
  0% {
    transform: scale3d(1, 1, 1);
  }
  50% {
    transform: scale3d(1.25, 1.25, 1.25);
  }
  100% {
    transform: scale3d(1, 1, 1);
  }
}

ngAnimate

In this AngularJS app we will have a dependency on ngAnimate so lets inject it into our app via dependency injection.

var app = angular.module("app", ["ngAnimate"]);

Control the value in the controller

As usual in an AngularJS app the value that we will be manipulating should have any operations located in the controller. So the currentVote variable will be initialised, incremented and decremented from our controller.

In this implementation we will be using the ‘controller as’ syntax to identify methods with the controller scope indicated with the vm (view model).

(function() {
  angular.module("app").controller("AppCtrl", function() {
      var vm = this;

      vm.currentVote = 0;

      vm.plusOne = function() {
        vm.currentVote = vm.currentVote + 1;
      }

      vm.minusOne = function() {
        vm.currentVote = vm.currentVote - 1;
      } 
      
      return vm;
  });
})();

To use a directive or not use a directive

We could also invoke the animation from our controller, first by injecting $animation into the anonymous function and then by adding code to the plusOne and minusOne functions like below.

Code Smell

In AngularJS this would give our code a ‘code smell’ as searching for elements by id or class is an anti-pattern as directives have been supplied to deal with this scenario. The controller should be controlling the value and the directive controlling the element to animate.

(function() {
  angular.module("app").controller("AppCtrl", function($animate) {
      var vm = this;
    
      var elementToPulse = angular.element(document.getElementById('badge'));

      vm.currentVote = 0;

      vm.plusOne = function() {
        vm.currentVote = vm.currentVote + 1;
        $animate.addClass(elementToPulse, "pulse");
      }

      vm.minusOne = function() {
        vm.currentVote = vm.currentVote - 1;
        $animate.addClass(elementToPulse, "pulse");
      } 
      
      return vm;
  });
})();

Watch the variable from our directive

We will create a directive called pulseOnChange that will watch for value changes in an element. Injecting $animate and $timeout provide the functionality to add the pulse class to the element on change and then to remove the pulse class after 1 second in this case as we have specified our animation to last 1 second.

(function() {
  angular.module("app").directive("pulseOnChange", function($animate, $timeout) {
    return function(scope, element, attrs) {
          scope.$watch(attrs.pulseOnChange, function() {
                  $animate.addClass(element, "pulse");
                  $timeout(function() {
                    $animate.removeClass(element, "pulse");
                  }, 1000);
          });
      };
  });
})();

Lets create the HTML

There are fours part to our HTML

  • declare our app and controller on the body and use the controller as snytax
  • a button to control the increment
  • a directive applied to the element containing the value
  • a button to decrement the value

We will use bootstrap 3 to layout our page, add styles and icons to our app.

<body ng-app="app" ng-controller="AppCtrl as vm">
  
  <div class="jumbotron vertical-center">
    <div class="container text-center">
      <button class="btn btn-success glyphicon glyphicon-thumbs-up" ng-click="vm.plusOne()"></button>
      <div class="badge-container vertical-center">
        <span class="badge" pulse-on-change="vm.currentVote">{{ vm.currentVote}}</span>
      </div>
      <button class="btn btn-success glyphicon glyphicon-thumbs-down" ng-click="vm.minusOne()"></button>
    </div>
  </div>
  
</body>

Lets view the end product

As we can see all the moving parts come together to highlight the change in value to the user without adding any additional visual noise to the page.

See the Pen AngularJS Pulse on change Directive by Nicholas Murray (@NicholasMurray) on CodePen.


Nicholas Murray
Stuff I've learnt and stuff I like