Now is the moment you've all been waiting for. We're going to be dealing with a 'back-end' and now all of our data is going to persist. IE when you refresh, the data will still be there.
We're going to be building a basic chatroom so by the end of class, you'll all be able to chat with each other. Here's what you'll be working towards (http://jaredbeauchamp.com/experiments/chatroom/index.html). You'll have to do some CSS magic to make it look that good, but feel free to get creative with the styling once you finish the core project.
This lesson is going to feel a little less hand holdy than the others have felt. That's on purpose. We're going to be dealing with some pretty advanced topics. Nothing you can't handle, it will just take some time and focus to figure out.
The concepts this project will cover are
- Angular Services
- $http
- Injecting a service into a controller
##Step 1: Clone and Dissect the Repo
- Fork and clone this repository.
- This is the first project where you'll have to work with part of the code that's already in place.
- You should only touch mainCtrl.js and parseService.js, everything else is already set up for you
- Although very convenient, because other parts of the application are already set for you, you need to understand what that code is doing in order to work with it.
- Go and check out the index.html page. You'll notice that in the message-container class there's an ng-repat looping over messages. This means that somehow, you need to have 'messages' on the scope which should also have a 'text' property.
##Step 2: Build your parseService
- In Angular we use 'services' to outsource some of our heavy lifting. That's exactly what we're going to do with this app.
- Open up parseService.js and read the instructions. The bigger picture is that this service is going to have two methods, getData and postData. getData will get the chats from our parse backend, and postData will be able to post new messages to the parse backend.
##Step 3: Tie in your Controller
- Now that your parseService is finished, we somehow need a way to tie the data we're getting from parseService.getData to our scope to show in our view. This sounds like the perfect use case for a controller.
- Open up mainCtrl.js and follow the instructions. The bigger picture here is that we're going to utilize the methods that we added to parseService to do some of the 'heavy' lifting, then just add what we get back from those methods to the $scope
##Step 4: Review
- If all went well you should be able to open up your index.html page and chat with those who also finished. If you got this far, great job! Review angular promises and $http. They're fundamental to any apps built with Angular.
##Step 5: Add Some Flavor
- Right now it just shows the message. The object you get back from parse also has a createdAt property. Change the UI to show the message, and what time it was created at in normal, human readable formats.
- Make the Chatroom filterable by message
- Be able to order the chatroom by date posted
- Reformat the App (and research more with Parse) on how to create your own rooms so that users can create a room then see only the chats in those specific rooms, then create a button for which users can create their own rooms.
- Make the styling look more...professional.
- Sign up with parse and create your own private chatroom with your own API keys.