Using angularjs with turbolinks

Ruby on-Rails Problem Overview

I am trying to use Angularjs framework in my app with turbolinks. After page change it do not initialize new eventlisteners. Is it any way to make it work? Thanks in advance!

Ruby on-Rails Solutions

Solution 1 - Ruby on-Rails

AngularJS vs. Turbolinks

Turbolinks as well as AnguluarJS can both be used to make a web application respond faster, in the sense that in response to a user interaction something happens on the web page without reloading and rerendering the whole page.

They differ in the following regard:

AngularJS helps you to build a rich client-side application, where you write a lot of JavaScript code that runs on the client machine. This code makes the site interactive to the user. It communicates with the server-side backend, i.e. with the Rails app, using a JSON API.
Turbolinks, on the other hand, helps to to make the site interactive without requiring you to code JavaScript. It allows you to stick to the Ruby/Rails code run on the server-side and still, "magically", use AJAX to replace, and therefore rerender, only the parts of the page that have changed.

Where Turbolinks is strong in allowing you use this powerful AJAX mechanism without doing anything by hand and just code Ruby/Rails, there might come a stage, as your application grows, where you would like to integrate a JavaScript framework such as AngularJS.

Especially in this intermedium stage, where you would like to successively integrate AngularJS into your application, one component at a time, it can make perfectly sense to run Angular JS and Turbolinks together.

How to use AngularJS and Turbolinks together

Use callback to manually bootstrap Angular

In your Angular code, you have a line defining your application module, something like this:

# app/assets/javascripts/angular-app.js.coffee
# without turbolinks
@app = angular.module 'MyApplication', ['ngResource']

This code is run when the page is loaded. But since Turbolinks just replaces a part of the page and prevents an entire page load, you have to make sure, the angular application is properly initialized ("bootstrapped"), even after such partial reloads done by Turbolinks. Thus, replace the above module declaration by the following code:

# app/assets/javascripts/angular-app.js.coffee
# with turbolinks
@app = angular.module 'MyApplication', ['ngResource']

$(document).on 'turbolinks:load', ->
  angular.bootstrap document.body, ['MyApplication']

Don't bootstrap automatically

You often see in tutorials how to bootstrap an Angular app automatically by using the ng-app attribute in your HTML code.

<!-- app/views/layouts/my_layout.html.erb -->
<!-- without turbolinks -->
<html ng-app="YourApplication">
  ...

But using this mechanism together with the manual bootstrap shown above would cause the application to bootstrap twice and, therefore, would brake the application.

Thus, just remove this ng-app attribute:

<!-- app/views/layouts/my_layout.html.erb -->
<!-- with turbolinks -->
<html>
  ...

Solution 2 - Ruby on-Rails

Turbolinks attempt to optimize rendering of pages and would conflict with normal bootstraping of AngularJS.

If you are using Turbolinks in some places of your app and some parts use Angular. I propose this elegant solution:

Each link to a page that is angularapp (where you use ng-app="appname") should have this attribute:

<a href="/myapp" data-no-turbolink>Say NO to Turbolinks</a>.

The second - mentioned on Stackoverflow is explicitly reloading/bootstrapping every ng-app by handling page:load event. I would that's intrusive, not to mention you're potentially loading something that isn't on a page hence wasting resources.

I've personally used the above solution.

Hope it helps

Solution 3 - Ruby on-Rails

In case of bug

> Uncaught Error: [ng:btstrpd] App Already Bootstrapped with this > Element 'document'

after upgrade to angular 1.2.x you can use below to fix problem.

angular.module('App').run(function($compile, $rootScope, $document) {
  return $document.on('page:load', function() {
    var body, compiled;
    body = angular.element('body');
    compiled = $compile(body.html())($rootScope);
    return body.html(compiled);
  });
});

In previous post @nates proposed to change angular.bootstrap(document, ['YourApplication']) to angular.bootstrap("body", ['YourApplication']) but this causes a flash of uncompiled content.

Solution 4 - Ruby on-Rails

Add the following event handler to your application.

Coffeescript:

bootstrapAngular = ->
  $('[ng-app]').each ->
    module = $(this).attr('ng-app')
    angular.bootstrap(this, [module])

$(document).on('page:load', bootstrapAngular)

Javascript:

function bootstrapAngular() {
  $('[ng-app]').each(function() {
    var module = $(this).attr('ng-app');
    angular.bootstrap(this, [module]);
  });
};
$(document).on('page:load', bootstrapAngular);

This will cause the angular application to be started after each page loaded by Turbolinks.

Credit to https://gist.github.com/ayamomiji/4736614

Solution 5 - Ruby on-Rails

Turbolinks doesn't quite make sense with an client side MVC framework. Turbolinks is used to to strip out the all but the body from server response. With client-side MVC you should just be passing JSON to the client, not HTML.

In any event, turbolinks creates its own callbacks.

page:load
page:fetch
page:restore
page:change

Solution 6 - Ruby on-Rails

The jquery.turbolinks plugin can trigger bootstrapping of modules via ng-app directives. If you're trying to manually bootstrap your modules, jquery.turbolinks can lead to ng:btstrpd errors. One caveat I've found is that jquery.turbolinks relies on the page:load event, which can trigger before any new page-specific <script> tags finish running. This can lead to $injector:nomod errors if you include module definitions outside of the application.js. If you really want your modules defined in separate javascript files that are only included on certain pages, you could just disable turbolinks on any links to those specific pages via data-no-turbolink.

Solution 7 - Ruby on-Rails

Based on the comments I've seen, the only valid scenario for using both together in a way where Angular would conflict with Turbolinks (such as where I allow Angular to handle some of the routing) is if I have an existing application that I'm trying to port to Angular.

Personally, if I were to do this from scratch, I think the best solution would be to decide what should handle the routing and stick with that. If Angular, than get rid of Turbolinks -> it won't do much for you if you have something close to a single-page app. If you allow Rails to handle the routing, then just use Angular to organize client-side behavior that can't be processed by the server when serving up the templates.

Am I missing a scenario, here? It doesn't seem elegant to me to try to split the routing responsibilities between different frameworks, even in a large application... Is there some other scenario where Turbolinks would interfere with Angular other than refreshing the page or navigating to a new route?

Solution 8 - Ruby on-Rails

Using Turbolinks and AngularJS together

+1 to @fiedl for a great answer. But my preference is to make use of page:change in concert with page:load because this affords some flexibility: the DOM can receive a page:load event from sources other than turbolinks, so you might not want to have the same callback fire.

Watching for a page:change, then a page:load should restrict your callback behaviour to solely turbolinks-instigated events.

function boostrapAngularJS () {
	angular.bootstrap(document.body, ['My Application']);
    addCallbackToPageChange();
}
function addCallbackToPageChange() {
    angular.element(document).one('page:change', function () {
	    angular.element(this).one('page:load', boostrapAngularJS);
    });
}
addCallbackToPageChange();

(This will allow/require you to keep your ng-app declaration in your html, as normal when working with AngularJS.)

Solution 9 - Ruby on-Rails

> Turbolinks automatically fetches the page, swaps in its <body>, and merges its <head>, all without incurring the cost of a full page load.

https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks#turbolinks

So, instead of append ng-app directive on the <html> element, we can just do it on the <body> element.

<html>
  <body ng-app=“yourApplicationModuleName">
  </body>
</html>

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Pavel	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Ruby on-Rails	fiedl	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Ruby on-Rails	jeveloper	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Ruby on-Rails	Artur Trzop	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Ruby on-Rails	Robin Daugherty	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Ruby on-Rails	cpuguy83	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Ruby on-Rails	Gabe Martin-Dempesy	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Ruby on-Rails	josiah	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 8 - Ruby on-Rails	JellicleCat	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 9 - Ruby on-Rails	Repolês	View Answer on Stackoverflow