Learn Algolia, Angular-material and Browserify

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

algolia

Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

Angular Material is an Angular-native, UI component framework from Google. It is a reference implementation of Google's Material Design and provides >30 UI components and services essential for mobile and desktop AngularJS applications.

In this course, we will quickly build a real-work application Angular UI application, take a tour of Angular Material, and learn how ngMaterial can be used in your projects.

*presented by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost*

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

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Introduction to AngularJS Material

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

The Angular Material Layout API wraps the flexbox CSS features with an amazingly easy, powerful HTML markup API. The Layout API hides the complexities of the CSS, is intuitive to use, and eliminates the need for developers to become flexbox experts to implement modern page layouts. 

In this lesson we will learn how to use the Angular Material Container components and the Layout API to implement the layouts specified in design wireframe.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost. 

Angular Material: Containers with the Layout API

Themes convey meaning through color, tones, and contrasts. And the theme color palettes, alphas, and shadows deliver a consistent tone to your application and a unified feel for all Angular Material UI components. Theming allows developers to change the intention and meaning of the application by changing the colors and shadows. 

Accessibility is a huge - often overlooked - feature in modern web applications. Angular Material components all implement ARIA features whenever possible. And for usage scenarios where the ARIA attributes are not explicitly provided and cannot be inferred, then Angular Material will provide details console warnings alerting the developer.

Let’s use the Angular Material Theming service to change the background, primary, accent, and warning colors used within the entire application. These will be configured at startup using the $mdThemeProvider.  

Let’s also resolve the two ARIA warnings shown in console. These originate from icon buttons where the ARIA label cannot be inferred. So let’s add a static aria-label and a dynamic, interpolated aria-label to those buttons.

> This course presented by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost

Angular Material: Theming and ARIA

Learn how to install Angular Material with `npm install`  and load the required libraries and stylesheets into your blank web page.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost

Angular Material: Installing with NPM

Angular is a development platform for creating applications using modern web standards. Angular includes a wealth of essential features such as mobile gestures, animations, filtering, routing, data binding, security, internationalization, and beautiful UI components. It's extremely modular, lightweight, and easy to learn.

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This lesson explores the Angular Material sidenav component. This includes input and display options, creating a sidenav with a nav list, and utilizing the `@angular/cdk` to update sidenav settings based on the users screen size.

Use the Angular Material Sidenav Component

Most Angular Material UI components are declarative and used directly in the HTML markup. Some components, however, are programmatic and must be configured and invoked from Javascript. Programmatic components have a short-term, limited DOM lifespan and include Dialogs, Toast, and BottomSheet.

Let’s use the BottomSheet service to configure and display an Angular Material BottomSheet container which in turn will display a nested, custom Contact Sheet view.

> This course presented by by Thomas Burleson & Aaron Frost.

Angular Material: Using a BottomSheet

Both flexbox CSS and the Angular Material Layout allow web applications to `respond` to the size of the browser at any given point. No matter what the browser width may be, the web app adjusts its layout sizing accordingly. Combine responsive functionality with media query support and your web applications will have `adaptive` features to adapt to the width of the browser at a specific points. More than fluidly adjusting the widths and heights of elements, Adaptive applications can change the rendered UX with new positions, new components, and new styles. Angular Material Layout hides the complexities of implementing adaptive features with a singularly unique and simple HTML syntax.
Let’s use the Adaptive extensions of the Angular Material API to hide the SideNav on small devices (like iPhone or Android). We will explore the use of the $mdMedia service to easily lock open the SideNav on larger devices. And we will see how the $mdSideNav service can be used to programmatically close the SideNav after a user is selected.

> This course presented by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost.

Angular Material: Adaptive Layouts

Angular Material provides over 30 UI components and services. The framework offers a suite of components and containers: from simple Button components with built-in ink and hover effects, theming, and ARIA support… to more complex container components like mdList and Tabs.  

Let’s use some of those components in our SideNav and Content containers. For now we will use hard-coded, HTML markup. This allows us to confirm the UX matches that specified in the design docs before we start working on our application logic.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson and Aaron Frost.

Angular Material: Intro to UI Components

Angular Material UI components have been designed from the ground-up to use dynamic, live data. Supporting AngularJS interpolation, expressions, and databindings… each component exposes an intuitive API and fully supports the existing ng-<xxx> directives published in AngularJS.

Let’s replace the hard-coded, static HTML with dynamic, mock data using AngularJS data bindings, ng-repeat, and the ng-click directives. Our UX remains unchanged, yet now we are using custom application logic and dataservices.

> This course has been created by Thomas Burleson & Aaron Frost.

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