Zero watches binding for AngularJs

Bindonce

High performance binding for AngularJs

Usage

• download, clone or fork it or install it using bower bower install angular-bindonce
• Include the bindonce.js script provided by this component into your app.
• Add 'pasvaz.bindonce' as a module dependency to your app: angular.module('app', ['pasvaz.bindonce'])

Demo

Here is an example of how AngularJs can freeze your UI, try to press and hold a key inside the input field, when the table is filled with only 1 person everything is ok, you can see how the DOM is updated by the input in real time, however if you try to load 1000 person (or even 500 if the testing device is not powerfull) and repeat the experiment you can see how the UI is frozen. In this other demo BindOnce will take care of your watchers and the UI will be reactive as it should be. The code is the same for both demos, the only difference is that I replaced any ng-* tag inside the table with the equivalent bo-* tag.

• AngularJs regular Demo
• Demo with Bindonce

Overview

AngularJs provides a great data binding system but if you abuse of it the page can run into some performance issues, it's known that more of 2000 watchers can lag the UI and that amount can be reached easily if you don't pay attention to the data-binding. Sometime you really need to bind your data using watchers, especially for SPA because the data are updated in real time, but often you can avoid it with some efforts, most of the data presented in your page, once rendered, are immutable so you shouldn't keep watching them for changes.

For instance, take a look to this snippet:

<ul>
	<li ng-repeat="person in Persons">
		<a ng-href="#/people/{{person.id}}"><img ng-src="{{person.imageUrl}}"></a>
		<a ng-href="#/people/{{person.id}}"><span ng-bind="person.name"></span></a>
		<p ng-class="{'cycled':person.generated}" ng-bind-html-unsafe="person.description"></p>
	</li>
</ul>

Angular internally creates a $watch for each ng-* directive in order to keep the data up to date, so in this example just for displaying few info it creates 6 + 1 (ngRepeatWatch) watchers per person, even if the person is supposed to remain the same once shown. Iterate this amount for each person and you can have an idea about how easy is to reach 2000 watchers. Now if you need it because those data could change while you show the page or are bound to some models, it's ok. But most of the time they are static data that don't change once rendered. This is where bindonce can really help you.

The above example done with bindonce:

<ul>
	<li bindonce ng-repeat="person in Persons">
		<a bo-href="'#/people/' + person.id"><img bo-src="person.imageUrl"></a>
		<a bo-href="'#/people/' + person.id" bo-text="person.name"></a>
		<p bo-class="{'cycled':person.generated}" bo-html="person.description"></p>
	</li>
</ul>

Now this example uses 0 watches per person and renders exactly the same result as the above that uses ng-*. (Angular still uses 1 watcher for ngRepeatWatch)

The smart approach

OK until here nothing completely new, with a bit of efforts you could create your own directive and render the person inside the link function, or you could use watch fighters that has a similar approach, but there is still one problem that you have to face and bindonce already handles it: the existence of the data when the directive renders the content. Usually the directives, unless you use watchers or bind their attributes to the scope (still a watcher), render the content when they are loaded into the markup, but if at that given time your data is not available, the directive can't render it. Bindonce can wait until the data is ready before to rendering the content. Let's take a look at the follow snippet to better understand the concept:

<span my-custom-set-text="Person.firstname"></span>
<span my-custom-set-text="Person.lastname"></span>
...
<script>
angular.module('testApp', [])
.directive('myCustomSetText', function () {
	return {
		link:function (scope, elem, attr, ctrl) {
			elem.text(scope.$eval(attr.myCustomSetText));
		}
	}
});
</script>

This basic directive works as expected, it renders the Person data without using any watchers. However, if Person is not yet available inside the $scope when the page is loaded (say we get Person via $http or via $resource), the directive is useless, scope.$eval(attr.myCustomSetText) simply renders nothing and exits.

Here is how we can solve this issue with bindonce:

<div bindonce="Person" bo-title="Person.title">
	<span bo-text="Person.firstname"></span>
	<span bo-text="Person.lastname"></span>
	<img bo-src="Person.picture" bo-alt="Person.title">
	<p bo-class="{'fancy':Person.isNice}" bo-html="Person.story"></p>
</div>

bindonce="Person" does the trick, any bo-* attribute belonging to bindonce waits until the parent bindonce="{somedata}" is validated and then renders its content. Once the scope contains the value Person then each bo-* child gets filled with the proper values. In order to accomplish this task, bindonce uses just one temporary watcher, no matters how many children need to be rendered. As soon as it gets Person the watcher is promptly removed. If the $scope already contains the data bindonce is looking for, then it doesn't create the temporary watcher and simply starts rendering its children.

You may have noticed that the first example didn't assign any value to the bindonce attribute:

<ul>
	<li bindonce ng-repeat="person in Persons">
	...

when used with ng-repeat bindonce doesn't need to check if person is defined because ng-repeat creates the directives only when person exists. You could be more explicit: <li bindonce="person" ng-repeat="person in Persons">, however assigning a value to bindonce in an ng-repeat won't make any difference.

Interpolation

Some directives (ng-href, ng-src) use interpolation, ie: ng-href="/profile/{{User.profileId}}". Both ng-href and ng-src have the bo-* equivalent directives: bo-href-i and bo-src-i (pay attention to the -i, it stands for interpolate). As expected they don't use watchers however Angular creates one watcher per interpolation, for instance bo-href-i="/profile/{{User.profileId}}" sets the element's href once, as expected, but Angular keeps a watcher active on {{User.profileId}} even if bo-href-i doesn't use it. That's why by default the bo-href doesn't use interpolation or watchers. The above equivalent with 0 watchers would be bo-href="'/profile/' + User.profileId". Nevertheless, bo-href-i and bo-src-i are still maintained for compatibility reasons.

Filters

Almost every bo-* directive replace the equivalent ng-* and works in the same ways, except it is evaluated once. Consequentially you can use any valid angular expression, including filters. This is an example how to use a filter:

<div bindonce="Person">
	<span bo-bind="Person.bill | currency:'USD$'"></span>
</div>

Attribute Usage

Build

$ npm install uglify-js -g
$ uglifyjs bindonce.js -c -m -o bindonce.min.js

Todo

Tests

Copyright

BindOnce was written by Pasquale Vazzana, you can follow him on google+ or on @twitter

Thanks to all the contributors

LICENSE - "MIT License"

Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Pasquale Vazzana

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.