Question

I’m working with angularjs and I want to be able to load directives as and when they are needed instead of having all of them loaded at the start of the page. I’m trying to create directives for my most frequently used plugins.

In this way, one direct can use yepnope to load all needed directives before finally compiling the html.

If the directive is loaded at start of page with the others, everything works just fine. However if the ‘child’ directive is loaded later (within the ‘parent’), it does not take effect. Below is the code for the pre field in the compile field of the ‘parent’ directive.

    ...
    var pre = function (scope, element, attrs) {
        element.html('Please wait. Loading...');
        ang.loadDirectives('caiDatePicker', function () {
            console.log('loaded');
            scope.data.raw = scope.rawData;
            var html = createObjUi(scope, scope.data, scope.defn);
            element.html(html); //data
            $compile(element.contents())(scope.$new());
            scope.$apply();
        });
    };
    return { restrict:'A', compile: {pre:pre,post:function(){...}};

ang.loadDirectives loads the directive using yepnope. Part of the code for the ‘child’ directive is as follows:

angular.module('mycomponents') //PS: I'm assuming this will fetch the already created module in the 'parent' directive
.directive('caiDatePicker', function ($parse) {
    return {
        scope: {},
        restrict: 'A',
        link: function (scope, element, attrs) {
            scope.$watch('this.$parent.editing', function (v) {
                scope.editing = v;
            });
            yepnope({
                test: $().datePicker,
                nope: [
                    '/content/plugins/datepicker/datepicker.js', //todo: use the loader
                    '/content/plugins/datepicker/datepicker.css'
                ],
                complete: function () {
                    if (scope.model && scope.model.value) {
                        var date = scope.model.value;
                        element.val(date.getDate() + '/' + (date.getMonth() + 1) + '/' + date.getFullYear());
                    }
                    element.datepicker({ weekStart: 1, format: 'dd/mm/yyyy' })
                        .on('changeDate', function (ev) {
                            scope.model.value = ev.date;
                            scope.$apply();
                        });
                }
            });
            attrs.$observe('path', function (v) {
                var fn = $parse(v);
                var model = fn(scope.$parent);
                scope.model = model;
            });
        }
    }
});

Is what I’m doing even possible in the first place?

If so, what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

After searching for so long and not getting any answers, I ended up with the following

1. Create an angular app. This is also an angular module.
2. You can add any directive to the module at any time using app.directive(name,function). These can be directives loaded asynchronously.
3. You can bootstrap any element. When bootstrapping, specify the app in the list of modules to angular.

The problem was that yepnope was not firing the complete function as I needed them to be. In the end, I build a small wrapper on top of yepnope that appears to guarantee that the complete function is fired.

Final code looks something like:

var app3 = new Cai.AngApp('app3');
app3.loadControllers('app1.controller3', function () {
        app3.loadDirectives('jsonEditor', 'datePicker', function () {
            app3.bootstrap($('#d3'));
    });
});