Key Strategies to Improve your Angular Codebase Instantly!
Utilizing the Angular framework for building an app is immensely beneficial. Nevertheless, coding in Angular can turn tricky at times, thereby adversely affecting the code quality. Thankfully, there are certain tried and tested strategies that will instantly improve the quality of your Angular codebase. This post provides Angular Development Company with detailed insights into these ingenious strategies. Take a look!
Key Strategies that Improve your Angular Codebase
Strategy 1: Adhering to the Standard Practices established by the Angular Team
The Angular framework clearly defines a set of rules and practices that one should follow for creating a uniform codebase across the organization. Adhering to these Angular app design guidelines proves beneficial in the following ways:
- Increases the uniformity of the code, thereby enhancing its quality
- Makes the app easier to comprehend
- Allows developers to speedily integrate into a new team owing to high familiarity with the code
Example: Take a look at this particular example of Angular design guideline
Naming Files:
Angular files should follow the naming conventions recommended by Angular team like each file with an Angular structure such as a pipe, a module, or a component is named in the following manner:
[Name].[structure].[file-extension]
Hence, for creating a component that is to be displayed to the customers, name it as ‘customer’ – its structure will be a component and the file extension will be ‘css’, ‘.ts’, or ‘html’ – Custumer.component.ts
All the aforesaid functions are taken care of by the Angular-cli by employing a command – ng-generate – for creating the structure, and the file that is created as an outcome of this function follows the naming convention automatically
Strategy 2: Bundling the code into Modules
One of the commonest mistakes developers commit is placing everything into the application module resulting in a complete mess. Therefore, it is advisable to employ modules and structure those modules as defined by the Angular team. The usage of modules ushers in the following benefits:
- Enables you to organize the code into small bundles/ chunks
- Enhances the code’s readability
- Allows one to effortlessly find errors while troubleshooting
- Enriches the UX by downloading only the parts that need to function
Key Modules in the Angular framework and their Functioning
Feature Modules:
Feature modules are created in a different folder named ‘feature’ and are meant to contain a particular feature. For instance, the feature-module for the attribute named ‘feature’ is placed within a directory called feature and the module file follows the naming convention – feature.module.ts.
The top advantages of using feature-modules are as follows:
- Enable structuring the code in an easy way that can be clearly understood
- Allow complete separation of various features to avoid any weird overlapping that may cause confusion and potential bugs
- Enable the usage of lazy-loading – a technique that makes it possible to download only the required module to the client’s device instead of downloading all modules. For instance, there’s no need for serving the code of the administration section for a blog to every user who visits the site. Instead, the admin-section can be separated into a feature-module and load it through lazy loading. So, the users now have to download the code for the blog-section only; the extra JavaScript code has to be downloaded by those users who wish to navigate to the admin section.
Core/Shared Modules
Why is Core/Shared Modules required?
Feature modules encase every directive/component/pipe into a separate module and so it cannot be used in other parts of the app if it is not imported. While such a function is immensely useful in certain situations, it doesn’t work for other cases. For instance, when there is a need to import the admin-module of the blog section for using a plain utility-directive, employing a feature module will complicate things and also overshadow its advantages. In such a case there arises a need to employ modules like ‘Core’ and ‘Shared’ for addressing other requirements. Check them out!
Shared Modules
Shared modules need to be used when pieces of your app are required to be used across multiple features/areas of the app. Therefore, components that are reused in multiple features are called shared modules like services and pipes. With shared modules, you can share common pieces for filling out feature module ‘sections’. All feature modules use shared modules without having to break the encasing of other modules. Example – A text-formatting module containing a set of pipes for formatting text in a particular way.
Core Modules
Core modules are encased within the CoreModule inside a directory named ‘core’ and are used for placing app-wide services that have been used only once.
This module provides all application-wide singleton services that may be required. It is imported into the application module and keeps the app module nice and tidy. Nevertheless, the core module is not limited to services only. Everything that is used app-wide, but isn’t suitable for a shared module can be executed using the core module. Example: Loading-spinners at the beginning of the app are not used elsewhere in the app and so building an additional shared module for this purpose would be an over kill.
Private Services within Components
Most Angular services are meant for functioning globally and are thereafter provided at an app-level called the App Module. But this strategy is useful only if you need the global-singleton pattern wherein a single global instance is needed if your service requires to cache things. In other instances, each component comes with a separate cache on account of Angular’s scoped dependency injection.
But, there are several services that do not require to be provided globally, particularly if used by a single component. Here, you need to provide the service within the component – a service that is directly attached to the component. You can also provide the services in a module that is accessible from anywhere it is required. For this reason, the services are related to features/feature-modules and hence they become easier to locate as well as understand in the correct context. Moreover, these are contained by a feature module that enables lazy-loading abilities. Furthermore, it reduces the risk of a dead code when the only module using that service is deleted.
Strategy 3: Keeping Logic outside your Components as a Separate Service
Keeping logic outside your components is a good strategy for improving the code quality. But why should the business logic exist as a separate service? The reasons are manifold.
Firstly, conducting testing for components and UI is quite challenging as compared to conducting pure logic testing and secondly, this strategy enables you to create more efficient tests at a fast pace. If available as a separate service, your logic can also be used by other components. This way, more amount of code can be reused minimizing the need for writing codes altogether. Furthermore, the code can be read effortlessly, if the logic exists in a separate file.
Strategy 4: Ensuring the Accuracy of your Asynchronous code
Angular’s environment involves stringent rules for achieving code consistency and this is applicable for the asynchronous code as well. The rxjs library is employed for every asynchronous function and this library utilizes the observer pattern. The following piece of advice will help you in ensuring the accuracy of the asynchronous code.
- Developers are often confused on which promises to use – The promise that enables using the TypeScript await operator or the powerful rxjs-observables? Remember that it is advisable to use the one suggested by the Angular team – rxjs-observables.
- Using rxjs-observables is complicated and if used improperly serious bugs may appear. The commonest error is not unsubscribing from the observable leading to memory leaks, unwanted calculations, and alterations in your app. In order to avoid this mistake, it is advised to use the async pipe as this pipe automatically unsubscribes from the observable after the component is deleted.
Strategy 5: Centralized State Management
The larger the application, the lower is the code quality. This is because since every component has its own state, the presence of hundreds of components becomes confusing and makes debugging all the more challenging. This problem can be resolved by practicing centralized state management.
What is centralized state management?
Centralized state management is the practice of storing the entire app’s state in one single location rather than being scattered all over the application. Here, a single instance controls the overall state and executes changes to the state.
Benefits of centralized state management
- It’s easy to find the state as it is present at one place and one need not have to search across the component tree
- It is a single object that need not be acquired from multiple places and so simplifies transfer between apps
- Problems arising during communication between components are solved as they react to state changes only.
Should you employ Redux/ngrx?
Using Redux is recommended while generating large apps containing multiple components. However Redux doesn’t work well in the case of small and mid-sized apps because it involves a host of boilerplate code that can over-complicate the code of the Angular application.
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Final Words:
All Angular app developers must necessarily follow these groundbreaking strategies to develop an impeccable Angular app. Need technical assistance with Angular app development? Contact Biz4Solutions, a highly experienced outsourcing software development company in India and U.S.A. Our high-end AngularJS development services are worth a try!
