The Norch-Angular app

Overview

This application is an example of a web-application that speaks to and renders Norch using angular.js. The application is loosely based on the Google Phone Gallery, which no longer exists, the Angular Phone Tutorial, and the Angular-Seed Project

You need to set up a remote norch in order for this app to work- see 'Norch' section below.

Prerequisites

Git

• A good place to learn about setting up git is here.
• Git home (download, documentation).

Node.js and Tools

• Get Node.js.
• Install the tool dependencies (npm install).

Norch

• Get Norch

Because a norch dependency - search-index has some breaking changes, you need to use an older version. Do this by installing like this:

sudo npm install -g norch@0.6.16

• Follow the intructions and set up a norch server on http://localhost:3030
• Clone this reuters dataset: https://github.com/fergiemcdowall/reuters-21578-json
• Index one or more files of reuters artcles from world-bank-projects-norchified.json. You can do this by using the GUI in norch and navigating to the file on your PC, or by running curl --form document=@world-bank-projects-norchified.json http://localhost:3030/indexer --form filterOn=mjtheme,totalamt from the command line, or by investigating Norch-Indexer
• If you are experiencing problems with Access-Control-Allow-Origin start norch with a cors header like so: ./node_modules/norch/bin/norch -c http://localhost:8000

Workings of the application

• The application filesystem layout structure is based on the angular-seed project.
• This application needs a Norch server running on http://localhost:3030 with some sample data index. See prerequisites section above.
• Read the Development section at the end to familiarize yourself with running and developing an angular application.

Development for your own project

The following docs describe how you can test and develop further this application.

Get the code

The easiest way is to just get the code with git clone:

git clone git@github.com:fergiemcdowall/norch-angular-app.git

Installing dependencies

The application relies upon various node.js tools, such as Bower, Karma and Protractor. You can install these by doing:

cd ./norch-angular-app
npm install

This will also run bower, which will download the angular files needed for the current step of the tutorial.

Most of the scripts described below will run this automatically but it doesn't do any harm to run it whenever you like.

Running the app during development

• Run npm start
• navigate your browser to http://localhost:8000/app/index.html to see the app running in your browser.

Running unit tests

We recommend using Jasmine and Karma for your unit tests/specs, but you are free to use whatever works for you.

• Start Karma with npm test
  • A browser will start and connect to the Karma server. Chrome is the default browser, others can be captured by loading the same url as the one in Chrome or by changing the test/karma.conf.js file.
• Karma will sit and watch your application and test JavaScript files. To run or re-run tests just change any of your these files.

End to end testing

We recommend using Jasmine and Protractor for end-to-end testing.

Requires a webserver that serves the application. See Running the app during development, above.

• Serve the application: run npm start.
• In a separate console run the end2end tests: npm run protractor. Protractor will execute the end2end test scripts against the web application itself.
  • The configuration is set up to run the tests on Chrome directly. If you want to run against other browsers then you must install the webDriver, npm run update-webdriver, and modify the configuration at test/protractor-conf.js.

Application Directory Layout

app/                --> all of the files to be used in production
  css/              --> css files
    app.css         --> default stylesheet
  img/              --> image files
  index.html        --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
  js/               --> javascript files
    app.js          --> the main application module
    controllers.js  --> application controllers
    directives.js   --> application directives
    filters.js      --> custom angular filters
    services.js     --> custom angular services
    animations.js   --> hooks for running JQuery animations with ngAnimate
  partials/         --> angular view partials (partial html templates) used by ngRoute
    partial1.html
    partial2.html
  bower_components  --> 3rd party js libraries, including angular and jquery

scripts/            --> handy scripts
  update-repo.sh       --> pull down the latest version of this repos
                           (BE CAREFUL THIS DELETES ALL CHANGES YOU HAVE MADE)
  private/             --> private scripts used by the Angular Team to maintain this repo
test/               --> test source files and libraries
  karma.conf.js        --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
  protractor-conf.js   --> config file for running e2e tests with Protractor
  e2e/
    scenarios.js       --> end-to-end specs
  unit/             --> unit level specs/tests
    controllersSpec.js --> specs for controllers
    directivesSpec.js  --> specs for directives
    filtersSpec.js     --> specs for filters
    servicesSpec.js    --> specs for services

Further reading