Using Web Components in Angular

Using Web Components in Angular

This tutorial teaches you how to use and interact with web components in an Angular application. We’ll build a small UI that adds people to a data grid.

This tutorial teaches you how to use and interact with web components in an Angular application. We’ll build a small UI that adds people to a data grid.

The base application

We are using the Angular CLI to generate a new project.

$ ng new webcomponents
$ cd webcomponents

Install components

The first step in using web components is installing them. In this case, we install vaadin-text-field, vaadin-button, and vaadin-grid from the Vaadin component set.

$ npm install --save @vaadin/vaadin-text-field @vaadin/vaadin-button @vaadin/vaadin-grid

Web Components are most often distributed as JavaScript. Add the following option to the root tsconfig.json:

tsconfig.json

{
  compilerOptions: {
    "allowJs": true
  }
}

Enable custom elements

By default, Angular assumes that all custom HTML elements are Angular components and throws errors when encountering non-angular components. You can enable custom elements by adding the CUSTOM_ELEMENTS_SCHEMA to the application module. At the same time, import the ReactiveFormsModule that we use for creating the form.

src/app/app.module.ts

import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
-import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
+import { NgModule, CUSTOM_ELEMENTS_SCHEMA } from '@angular/core';
+ import { ReactiveFormsModule } from '@angular/forms';

import { AppComponent } from './app.component';

@NgModule({
  declarations: [AppComponent],

imports: [BrowserModule],

imports: [BrowserModule, ReactiveFormsModule],

schemas: [CUSTOM_ELEMENTS_SCHEMA],
providers: [],
bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule {}

Add polyfills for older browsers

Although most modern browsers ship with built-in support for Web Components, there are still users out there with older browsers. If you want to make your app available to them as well, you want to include polyfills that emulate the functionality in browsers without native support.

The webcomponents.js polyfill comes with a loader script that can be used to load only the polyfills a particular browser needs. It loads the polyfills dynamically, so it cannot be imported directly as a JS dependency that gets built by Webpack. Instead, you need to copy over the dependencies and include the loader in your index file. The library also includes an ES5 compatibility script in case you transpile your app into ES5.

$ npm install --save-dev @webcomponents/webcomponentsjs

Copy polyfills

You need to copy over the polyfills to load them. You can do this by adding them to the assets array in angular.json.

angular.json

"assets": [
"src/favicon.ico",
"src/assets",

{

"glob": "*/.js",

"input": +"node_modules/@webcomponents/webcomponentsjs",

"output": "webcomponents/"

}

Load polyfills

Then, include the loader and an optional import for the ES5 compatibility script in the <head> section of index.html.

src/index.html

<script src="webcomponents/webcomponents-loader.js"></script>
<script>
 if (!window.customElements{document.write('<!--');}
</script>
<scripsrc="webcomponents/custom-elements-es5-apter.js"></script>
<!-- ! DO NOT REMOVE THIS COMMENT, WE NEED ITS CLOSING MARKER -->

Verify that you can run the application with

$ ng serve

Building the application

You are now ready to use web components. Begin by importing the components in app.component.ts. At the same time, import FormGroup and FormControl for building the form.

src/app/app.component.ts

import '@vaadin/vaadin-button';
import '@vaadin/vaadin-grid';
import '@vaadin/vaadin-text-field';
import { FormGroup, FormControl } from '@angular/forms';

The form and grid bind to a Person object. Create a definition for it. You can either to it in a separate file and import it, or inline it in the app component file.

src/app/app.component.ts

class Person {
 constructor(public firstName: string, public lastName: string) {}
}

Finally, replace the component implementation with the following:

src/app/app.component.ts

export class AppComponent {
 people: Person[] = []; (1)
 form = new FormGroup({ (2)
   firstName: new FormControl(''),
   lastName: new FormControl('')
 });

 addPerson() { (3)
   this.people = [

 ...this.people,
 new Person(this.form.value.firstName, this.form.value.lastName)

   ];
   this.form.reset();
 }
}
  1. Our component state is an array of people that should be listed in the grid
  2. A reactive FormGroup with controls for firstName and lastName
  3. When submitting the form, create a new array containing a Person object with the information in the form, then reset the form.

Defining the view HTML

Replace the contents of the component HTML file with the following:

src/app/app.component.html

<form [formGroup]="form" (ngSubmit)="addPerson()"> (1)
 <vaadin-text-field
   label="First Name"
   formControlName="firstName"
   ngDefaultControl> (2)
 </vaadin-text-field>
 <vaadin-text-field
   label="Last Name"
   formControlName="lastName"
   ngDefaultControl>
 </vaadin-text-field>
 <vaadin-button (click)="addPerson()"> Add </vaadin-button>
</form>

<vaadin-grid [items]="people"> (3)
  <vaadin-grid-column path="firstName" header="First name">
  </vaadin-grid-column>
  <vaadin-grid-column path="lastName" header="Last name"> </vaadin-grid-column>
</vaadin-grid>
  1. Bind the formGroup to the one we defined in the component, submit to the addPerson method.
  2. In addition to formControlName, add ngDefaultControl.
  3. Bind the people array to the items property on the grid.

The only difference to a standard Angular form is the use of ngDefaultControl on the fields to tell Angular to treat the custom fields as standard text inputs.

Conclusion

Once you have installed polyfills for older browsers, you can use Web Components interchangeably with Angular components. For the most part, you would use Web Components as leaf node components, and Angular for views and other composite components.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, share it with all of your programming buddies!

Originally published on vaadin.com

angular angular-js web-development

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