We’ve moved much of our code over to TypeScript. There are a lot of benefits. To start, you can just dump your javascript files directly into typescript “.ts” files and it will compile them for you and web-essentials plugins will minify them for you everytime you click “save”.
The next step is to take advantage of the programming language and start using it as a real tool. The most effective approach to dealing with AngularJs in TypeScript, for me, has been to simply turn every controller and factory into a class object.
While you can go “all in” and make everything uber-typescripted, it is often easiest to just stick to a few basics and work with that for larger projects, especially when we’ve got 5 or 6 people of varied skill levels all working on the same project. Let’s keep it simple!
So, here is a basic rundown of making an Angularjs controller and using a factory to get some data over to it.
Kendo UI has some great tools, but Angular is simply much more powerful when dealing with web-based data-management systems. To leverage Kendo, Angular has created Kendo-Directives. Almost any Kendo object can be created and managed from Angular, thereby removing the dependancy on jQuery and enabling Angular to keep those objects in scope.
When designing data systems to be used by internal businesses, whether ERP or CRM systems, they have to be designed to be able to keep up with the fingers of professional data-entry people. These aren’t your standard internet folks who want to buy a widget on Amazon, these are people who will be putting in hundreds of orders a day. People who know every button and how many tabs it is until they need to hit the enter key and move on. Here is an example of a dropdown that can trigger a local filter of a JSON object which avoids us making a call-back to the server.