AngularJS: Views and Controllers

Reference: AngularJS in Action.

Understanding how views and controllers work–and more importantly how they relate to each other–is the foundation for understanding AngularJS. Much of the prototype work that we do starts with a simple view and controller, and as we achieve the desired functionality, we’ll start to refactor out the view to directives and the controller to services.

• A view is the HTML after it has been through the AngularJS compilation process.
• A controller is responsible for defining methods and properties on scope so that they’re available to the view.
• Scope in AngularJS is simply a JavaScript object that has some events built into it so that the view and controller can be synchronized. It’s essentially the glue between the view and controller.
• The new controller-as syntax simplifies our controllers by implicitly assigning the controller instance to the scope itself.
• When a property is declared on scope, it’s immediately available for binding in the view.
• When a mehod is declared on scope, it’s available to be called from the view.
• AngularJS comes with prebuilt directives that you can use to perform operations such as ngRepeat for iterating over a collection and displaying each instance with a template or ngClick for capturing a mouse click and calling a method on the controller.
• You can use filters to filter out items in a collection in ngRepeat so that you only display a subset of the original array, as you saw in the case of our storyboard columns.