How to inject external JS library into a module? - seedstack

Question

I'm using SeedStack to create a web application. In order to do that, I use W20 to develop my frontend. I need specific JavaScript libraries into that project. How can I inject an external javascript library into it ? I want to use Chart.js http://www.chartjs.org/ to visualize data into charts. To do that, I suppose that I have to inject ChartJS as a dependency module in Angular.
Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Before getting to the specific answer, please note that SeedStack already has an add-on for charts. As for integrating a library with W20, you have two main things to do:
Configure RequireJS to load the JS file and be able to inject it as a dependency.
Integrate the library with the AngularJS framework, which is often done by writing some directive.
Fortunately for you, Angular directives are already available for Chart.js, thanks to the angular-chart.js library. You just need to configure RequireJS to load it. Add a requireConfig section to the manifest of one of your fragments:
{
"id": "my-fragment",
...
"requireConfig": {
"paths": {
"{angular-chart.js}": "${components-path:bower_components}/angular-chart.js/dist",
"{chart.js}": "${components-path:bower_components}/chart.js/dist"
},
"map": {
"{angular-chart.js}/angular-chart": {
"angular": "{angular}/angular",
"chart": "{chart.js}/Chart"
}
}
}
}
The paths section declares locations of the two Chart.js libraries. Note that we use a variable named components-path with a default value of bower_components here. This is useful when using the W20 bridge add-on.
The map section declares a mapping between the expected and the real paths for dependencies of angular-chart.js.
You can then use the angular-chart.js library according to its documentation:
define([
'{angular}/angular',
'{angular-chart.js}/angular-chart',
], function(angular) {
var module = angular.module('myModule', ['ngResource', 'chart.js']);
module.controller('ContentController', [ '$scope', function($scope) {
// your JS code here
// (with your markup in a corresponding angular template)
}]);
});