Is it good practice to reference services in html templates in Angular 2? - templates

Question

As the question states, is there any downside in referencing the service directly in the template as such :
[disabled]="stateService.selectedClient == null || stateService.currentStep == 1"
In my opinion this doesn't seem like good practice and I'd much rather keep a "selectedClient" object in whatever component needs to use it. How can I get the state and store it into local variables, while observing the changes:
example: I want to move from step1 to step2 by changing "currentStep" in the "stateService", however I want the component that keeps "currentStep" ALSO as a local variable to reflect the change in the state?

Answer 1

Is it good practice to reference services in html templates in Angular
2?
I'd generally avoid it. It seems to bring more chaos than good.
Cons:
Coming from OOP background, this approach looks like it breaks the Law of Demeter, but more importantly,
It's no longer MVC, where your controller (Angular2's Component) acts like a mediator between the view and the services.
Like Ced said, what if a call to a service's member is costly and we need to refer to it multiple times in the view?
At the moment my editor of choice (VS Code) does not fully support Angular2 templates; referencing too many things outside of its own Component's scope in a template makes refactoring not fun anymore.
Pros:
Sometimes it looks more elegant (because it saves you 2 lines of code), but trust me, it's not.
How can I get the state and store it into local variables, while
observing the changes
Madhu Ranjan has a good answer to this. I'll just try to make it more complete here for your particular example:
In your StateService, define:
currentStep : Subject<number> = new Subject<number>();
selectedClient: Subject<Client> = new Subject<Client>();
changeStep(nextStep: number){
this.currentStep.next(nextStep);
}
selectClient(client: Client) {
this.selectedClient.next(client);
}
In your Component:
currentStep: number;
constructor(stateService : StateService){
stateService.currentStep.combineLatest(
stateService.selectedClient,
(currStep, client) => {
if (client == null) {
// I'm assuming you are not showing any step here, replace it with your logic
return -1;
}
return currStep;
})
.subscribe(val => {
this.currentStep = val;
});
}

Answer 2

You may try below,
stateService
currentStep : Subject<number> = new Subject<number>();
somestepChangeMethod(){
this.currentStep.next(<set step here to depending on your logic>);
}
component
// use this in template
currentStep: number;
constructor(stateService : stateServiceClass){
stateService.currentStep.subscribe(val => {
this.currentStep = val;
});
}
Hope this helps!!

Answer 3

It is probably not a good idea to expose your subject inside of your state service. Something like this would be better.
StateService
private currentStep: Subject<number> = new Subject<number>();
changeStep(value: number) {
this.currentStep.next(value);
}
get theCurrentStep(): Observable<number> {
this.currentStep.asObservable();
}
Component
currentStep: number;
constructor(private stateService: StateService) {
this.currentStep = this.stateService.theCurrentStep;
}
Template
[disabled]="(currentStep | async) == 1" // Not sure if this part would work