/itunes

Primary LanguageJavaScript

iTunes Angular Clone

Learning Objectives (Students will…):

  • be able to make $http requests to various APIs
  • be able to use outside directives and know how to inject those modules into their application
  • be able to create, return, and resolve their own promises with $q

You now should be to the point where you understand the bigger picture of the iTunes web app that has been show to you throughout the class (http://tylermcginnis.com/itunes). Tonight, you're going to recreate your own version of it which fetches Artists using the iTunes API.

The concepts this project will cover are

  1. $http
  2. Angular Services
  3. Passing a Service into your Controller
  4. Working with outside code (ng-grid)

##Step 1: Clone and Dissect the Repo

  • Fork and clone this repository.
  • Go and check out http://tylermcginnis.com/itunes. Although that example includes a bunch of filtering options, this project will just be fetching data by artist name.
  • Examine the codebase. Like the ChatRoom project, the index.html page is already built for you. Your main goal is to fill in mainCtrl.js and itunesService.js
  • If you're feeling adventurous, feel free to change the CSS how you would like.
  • Head over to http://angular-ui.github.io/ng-grid/ and check out the examples there. We will be using ng-grid to display the data we get from iTunes. Although all this code will already be in place for you, it's a good idea to get familiar with ng-grid so you know exactly what that code is doing.

##Step 2: Build your itunesService

  • In Angular we use 'services' to outsource some of our heavy lifting. That's exactly what we're going to do when we call the iTunes API.
  • Open up itunesService.js and read the instructions. The bigger picture is that this service is going to have a method which takes in an artist name as the parameter, then uses a JSONP http request to call the iTunes API and retrieve the data about that specific artist.

##Step 3: Tie in your Controller

  • Now that your itunesService is finished, we somehow need a way to tie the data we're getting from itunesService to our view (index.html)
  • Go to mainCtrl.js and follow the instructions in order to get the itunes data from your service to your view

##Step 4: Add More Options

  • Go back and look at the original data you're getting from iTunes. There is a lot more that you can play around with...
  • Add more columns to ng-grid so the user can see more options
  • Add a filtering option so they can filter by price, name, etc etc.
  • Also add a options dropdown so they can select which type of data they want from iTunes. Artist, song, movie, etc.(In other words, make it exactly like http://tylermcginnis.com/itunes)