Learn Algolia, Ngrx-store and Xstream

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

As your Angular application grows, it becomes more difficult to manage application state.

NgRx can help with that!

In this course, we will learn how to convert an Angular application from using stateful services into using NgRx.

We will accomplish this by adding a new feature, including building a reducer and actions. We'll also touch on using selectors to query our state, managing collections with NgRx entity, async operations, and hiding implementation details with the facade pattern.

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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Reactive State Management in Angular with ngrx

***Note: RxJS imports have changed since the publication of this course. The concepts being taught on RxJS are still applicable.**

Angular has many built-in features for working closely with RxJS to help you build entirely reactive applications. This course will teach you how to use Angular with RxJS. We will learn how to use the ngrx/store library to manage state in a clean, reactive "Redux style."

This course assumes you've got a working knowledge of Angular and reactive programming with RxJS. If you don't, you might want to watch the following courses to get you up to speed! 
- [Get Started with Angular](https://egghead.io/courses/get-started-with-angular) 
- [Introduction to Reactive Programming with RxJS](
https://egghead.io/series/introduction-to-reactive-programming). 
- [Step by Step Async Programming with RxJS](https://egghead.io/series/step-by-step-async-javascript-with-rxjs) 
- [Getting Started With Redux](https://egghead.io/series/getting-started-with-redux), a course by Redux's, Dan Abramov.

We also have Intermediary Angular courses if you'd like to acquire more in-depth knowledge. 
- [Dependency Injection](https://egghead.io/courses/angular-2-dependency-injection-di-explained
- [Components, Directives](https://egghead.io/courses/building-angular-components)
- [Forms](https://egghead.io/courses/intro-to-angular-forms)
- [Router](https://egghead.io/courses/intro-to-angular-router)
- [Animating Web Apps](https://egghead.io/courses/animate-angular-web-applications)



Build Redux Style Applications with Angular, RxJS, and ngrx/store

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 

Reducers are also often used for changing a single property inside of other reducers. This lesson shows how a type can enter the people reducer, but then the people reducer can use a different type to call the clock reducer and get a value back.

Use a Reducer to Change an Object's Property Inside an Array

This lesson summarizes everything the course has covered and how Angular 2, RxJS, and ngrx/store work together to achive a reactive application.

Review of Angular 2, RxJS, and Reducers from ngrx/store

The scan operator in RxJS is the main key to managing values and states in your stream. Scan behaves just as a reduce function would, but scan is able to collect values from streams over time. This lesson covers using startWith to set the initial accumulator value then using scan to update the value of the clock from the clicks and interval.

Manage State in RxJS with StartWith and Scan

While you have multiple streams flowing into your scan operator, you'll need to map each stream to the specific values you need to update your state the way that you want. This lesson covers using the map operator to determine what the click and interval should do when the state is updated.

Map Streams to Values to Affect State

Angular templates use a special Async pipe to be able to render out Observables. This lesson covers the syntax used to create an Observable in Angular and then to render it out in the template.

https://github.com/johnlindquist/rxjs-in-angular2/tree/11aa4c29a4536dad0ef26b78d8f7f503e4372f74/src

Render an Observable with the Async Pipe

ngrx/store is a library that simplifies common RxJS patterns for managing state and gives you an easy api to use it within your Angular application. This lesson shows how to convert a common startWith and scan stream into an ngrx Store and reducer.

Use ngrx/store and Reducers for Angular Application State

Angular allows you to pass values from inputs simply by referencing them in the template and passing them into your Subject.next() call. This lesson shows you how to make a number input and pass the value so you can configure how much you want the clock to change.

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