Question

I have a webpage with dynamic content. Let’s say it’s a product page. When the user goes directly to example.com/product/123 I want to render my product template on the server and send html to the browser. However, when the user later clicks a link to /product/555 I’d like to use JavaScript to update the template on the client-side.

I’d like to use something like Knockout.js or Angularjs, but I don’t see how I can pre-populate those templates with some initial data on the server and still have a functioning template on the client. i.e. If my Angular template is this:

<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="feature in features">
      {{feature.title}}
      <p>{{feature.description}}</p>
    </li>
</ul>

When the user goes directly to the URL, I need something that still works as an Angular template, but is filled in with the html for the current product. Obviously this doesn’t work:

<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="feature in features">Hello
      <p>This feature was rendered server-side</p>
    </li>
    <li>Asdf <p>These are stuck here now since angular won't replace them when
       it updates.... </p></li>
</ul>

It seems like my only option is to send the server-rendered html to the browser along with a separate matching template…?

In that case, I’d like to avoid writing every template twice. Which means I need to either switch to JavaScript for my server language (which I would not be happy about) or choose a template language that compiles to both Java and JavaScript and then find a way to hack it into the Play Framework (which is what I’m currently using.)

Does anyone have any advice?

Answer 1

If you would really like to have an initial value stored in an area before Angular activates- you can use the ng-bind attribute rather than {{bound strings}}, from your example:

<ul>
    <li ng-repeat="feature in features">
        <div ng-bind="feature.title">Hello</div>
        <p ng-bind="feature.description">This feature was rendered server-side but can be updated once angular activates</p>
    </li>
</ul>

I’m not sure where this would come in handy, but you’ll also want to include the initial data-set as part of a script tag in the document, so that when angular DOES activate it doesn’t wipe out the displayed information with nulls.

Edit: (As requested by commenters)

Alternatively, you could make an ng-repeat at the top of the list, have it configured to fill out based on the ‘features’ list itself. Following that ng-repeat element, have non-ng-repeat elements which have an ng-hide attribute with the setting ng-hide=”features”, if Angular loads, all the elements from the original server-provided list hide themselves, and the angular list jumps into existence. No hacky modifications to Angular, and no fiddling with the direct ng-bind attribute.

As a side note, you might still want to send a piece of script capable of reading that initial server-element for its data to feed it into angular before angular synchronizes if you want to avoid a blink where angular clears the data while waiting for a request for the same data from the server.