angular-template-bundler

Get your initial view rendered and load all other templates at once

What it does

Using templateBundler, your initial view will be rendered as usual, but after that all your templates will be fetched in a single HTTP request, so as to reduce overall load without delaying the initial view

Getting started

Integrating the code

Install this via your bower.json and include template-bundler.js with your script files, like so:

<script src="bower_components/angular-template-bundler/template-bundler.js"></script>

Require templateBundler as a dependency for your app module, like so:

var myApp = angular.module('myApp', ['templateBundler'])

Providing the templates

Make your templates available as a single JSON file. In order to make that simple and reliable, a build script is included. It requires async, but otherwise relies on nodejs core functionality. If you don't want to use that, skip the rest of this section and see a sample JSON file at the end of this document.

Using the build script

First, you need to npm install async (or, better yet, put async in your package.json as a dependency), then simply go to your app directory and execute build-template-bundle.js:

node bower_components/angular-template-bundler/build-template-bundle.js

That will gather all non-hidden files (files not starting with a period character, so as to ignore .gitkeep and the likes) from the templates/ directory and write them to the file templates.json.

If your templates reside in a different directory, you can give that as the first parameter, like so:

node bower_components/angular-template-bundler/build-template-bundle.js tmpl

The name of the directory will be used as the file name, so in the above example, the file would be tmpl.json. You can override that as well by appending another parameter, like so:

node bower_components/angular-template-bundler/build-template-bundle.js tmpl templates.json

If you have your templates written to a file other than templates.json, you need to tell the runtime code about it, like so:

myApp.config(['templateBundlerConfigProvider', function (templateBundlerConfigProvider) {
  templateBundlerConfigProvider.setBundleURL('tmpl.json')
}])

How it works

templateBundler hooks into angular's $templateRequest service, and after the templates needed for the initial view (the first one after the user arrives on the page) have been downloaded, it will answer all subsequent requests for templates with its own promises while downloading the templates bundle file. When the download of said file is completed, the contained templates become available to the whole app and all the promises are resolved in the normal way.

With this in place, there are three phases to template requests:

1. The initial request for the first view – this should be as fast, and therefore as small, as possible
2. Template loading in aggregate – all templates are now being downloaded in one single request
3. All templates reside in $templateCache and are conveniently served from there through the default pathway

$templateRequest

This works on the $templateRequest service. So if you use a custom template strategy that eshews that service, this will not work as a drop-in solution.

Use the Source, Luke

For more in-depth knowledge, peruse the source – it's quite simple really, and extensively documented =)

templates.json

The templates bundle file is basically a key/value store with the same data as you want the $templateCache to have. Keys are the templates' URLs, values their respective HTML sources. It should look something like this:

{
  "templates/view1.html": "<section>My first page =D</section>",
  "templates/view2.html": "<section>My second page =)</section>",
  "templates/view3.html": "<section>Another page =|</section>",
  "templates/view4.html": "<section>Booooring =(</section>"
}