Learn Angular-cli, Lodash and Mocha

[Lodash](https://lodash.com/docs/) is a collection of utilities that have become a staple of modern web development. This collection will show you how to re-create its most common methods using simple JavaScript techniques available in any modern web browser. In addition to re-building tools like `_.merge`, `_.get` and `_.debounce` from scratch you will also learn how to replace them completely in some cases with modern syntax such as [optional chaining](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optional_chaining), [nullish coalescing](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Nullish_coalescing_operator) and [Object.fromEntries](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/fromEntries).

This collection should interest the following groups:
- Those who want to better understand common JavaScript patterns
- Engineers who want to reduce their dependence on Lodash (for performance or other reasons)
- Candidates preparing for a technical job interview (where it is common to be asked how to implement some of these methods).

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Recreating Popular JavaScript Utility Methods from Lodash

A modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance & extras.

lodash

This lesson shows how to refactor your old loops into using a simpler and more powerful lodash-style. We will start by looking at how many people traditionally write JavaScript `for` loops and then talk about the alternate style and benefits that Lodash offers.

Lodash: Refactoring Simple For Loops

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.

angularjs

Lodash has an enormous amount of utility functions for dealing with collections and objects in javascript. You can use it in your AngularJS applications to "debounce" user input, or add delay between user actions. This is a common technique for text input to hold firing service calls until the user stops typing for a fraction of a second.

Debounce (delay) User Input in AngularJS with Lodash

Chai is a BDD / TDD assertion library for node and the browser that can be delightfully paired with any javascript testing framework.

chai

Every dependable library needs to have tests to ensure that you don't push accidental bugs. In this lesson, see how you can set up mocha and chai to start testing your library.

Setting up Unit Testing with Mocha and Chai

Now that you've got everything set up with mocha and chai, it's time to actually write tests. In this lesson you'll learn how to use `describe` and `it` to outline your tests and make sure you don't break your library in the future.

Unit Testing with Mocha and Chai

Imagine if looking at your business logic read as simple as a story from a children's book. That's exactly what we'll cover by learning how to compose small pieces of business logic and also set them up for further composition in the future.

We're showing a list of fictional tweets in a trivial React component created with create-react-app, however the example is not React specific and can be applied to any framework/environment.

Our example will refactor out business logic from a non-composable function to small composable pieces. To accomplish this we'll be using flow, filter and map from lodash/fp, which is included in the regular lodash npm package.

This approach works well in any environment where you're not relying on object references to your original data, as our functional approach creates new collection objects instead of mutating them.

Guide to lodash/fp: https://github.com/lodash/lodash/wiki/FP-Guide


Refactor Business Logic to Composable Functions with Lodash

Lodash's "sortBy" method helps you sort data in your collections and "sortedIndex" helps you find where to place new data. In this video, John walks you through how to use each of these methods and how they can work together.

Lodash - sortBy and sortedIndex

angular-cli

Generating components with the Angular CLI allows for scaffolding applications quickly. Learn what will be generated for you and how to generate quickly with shortcuts in the desired directory.

Generate components with the Angular CLI

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.

angular

Getting started with angular development can be difficult, with a lot of moving parts. Allow the Angular CLI to handle those complexities so you can focus on creating great applications.

In this lesson you will learn how to install the Angular CLI from npm, create a new application, serve the new application in the browser and edit it with live-reload.

Install the Angular CLI to Create and Serve an Angular Application

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on Node.js and in the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.

mocha

Mocha is a testing framework that provides structure for unit tests. In this lesson, we will be setting up Mocha with npm and npm scripts, writing a "Hello World" unit test, then writing the code to make the test pass (as an example of Test Driven Development (TDD), with the "red-green-refactor" workflow).

JavaScript Testing Fundamentals: Hello world unit test with Mocha (in ES6)

In this lesson, we will use Chai's request method to test our Node application's API responses.
By the end of this lesson, you will know how to:
- install the prerequisites to use mocha and chai in your application
- test for HTTP status response codes
- test for a string of text on a page
- test for a json response and validate the properties of the object
- write tests that not only verify the response of your application, but the behavior as well


Test Node RESTful API with Mocha and Chai

Property access in Javascript can be problematic - especially when dealing with nested Objects and Arrays. Doing it manually and in a safe manner requires tons of boilerplate inside conditionals and results in a defensive style of coding. In this lesson we look at why this is a problem & how to overcome it using the `get` method from the popular utility library `Lodash`

Safer property access with Lodash's 'get' method

Writing great ES6 style Promises for Node.js is only half the battle. Your great modules must include tests as well to ensure future iterations don't break them. In this lesson, I show you a simple ES6 Promise in Node.js, then walk you through creating tests in Mocha using chai and chai-as-promised to test both resolve and reject methods.

Testing ES6 Promises in Node.js using Mocha and Chai

Logic often gets added to our loops. We need to iterate over a collection, and get the sum of values, for instance. This approach can lead to complicated methods, that are hard to test. Using Lodash (Underscore), we are going to extract logic in a large loop body into well named methods. The result will be cleaner and easier to understand.

Refactoring: Replace Loop with Collection Closure using Lodash

In this lesson, you will learn how to verify your API server is returning HTTP 400 responses when clients submit incorrect data. Returning HTTP 400 ensures that your clients are notified of the incorrect usage. Testing for them ensures your API returns errors instead of incorrect responses when supplied with incorrect data.

Test for HTTP 400 responses with Mocha and Chai

Learn how to use Object.assign to combine multiple objects together. This pattern is helpful when writing libraries that have a set of default options where you want to allow a user to override specific options. You'll also learn how to use a third party library to recursively merge nested objects together.

Combine Objects with Object.assign and Lodash merge

Lodash is a toolkit of Javascript functions that provides clean, performant methods for manipulating objects and collections. It is a "fork" of the Underscore library and provides additional functionality as well as some serious performance improvements. If you aren't using Lodash, you should be.

Introduction to Lodash

In this lesson we will our `UiModule`, that has a `LayoutComponent`, `HeaderComponent` and `FooterComponent`. 

We generate `UiModule` by running the following command:
```
ng generate module ui --module app
```

This generates the new module and imports it in our `AppModule`.

We'll create the `LayoutComponent` using:
```
ng generate component ui/containers/layout
ng generate component ui/containers/header
ng generate component ui/containers/footer
``` 

We update our `AppRoutingModule` and add this component to our first route to make it visible. 

The `HeaderComponent` and `FooterComponent` are referenced in the LayoutComponent and we implement the actual templates!

Create Application Layout with Components in an Angular CLI Project

In this lesson we will add the `ProductModule`, where our actual application code will live.

```
ng g m product --routing
``` 

We will add 2 routes to `AppRoutingModule`,  the first is a redirect route that redirects any unhandled paths to `products`. The second route is the actual `products` route, that 'lazy-loads' the `ProductModule`.

We use the `ng` command to create the `ProductListComponent` and `ProductDetailComponent`, which are so called 'containers components'.

Container components are responsible for fetching data, handling routes and passing data into the 'presentational components' 

We will add 2 routes to `ProductRoutingModule`,  one to each of our new Container Components.

Lastly we will use  `ActivatedRoute` in `ProductDetailComponent` to fetch the `:id` from the route.

Create Container Components for Retrieving Data in an Angular CLI Project

In this lesson we will create the presentational components for the product list and detail pages. These components define how the data is displayed and are being referenced from the Container components.

The new components are `ProductsComponent` and `ProductComponent`.

After using `ng generate` to generate these components, we will update the `ProductListComponent` to invoke `ProductsComponent` and pass in our local `products` array.

In `ProductsComponent` we loop over each of the items we get from the `@Input() products` and pass each one into our `ProductComponent`.

The `ProductComponent` has 2 `Inputs()`, one for the `Product` and a `boolean` that toggles showing the product details. This is useful because don't want to show product details in the list view.

After the `ProductComponent` is implemented the last step is to reference it from the `ProductDetails` container component. 

Create Presentational Components for Displaying Data in an Angular CLI Project

In this lesson we will create the `ProductsService` that is responsible for the interaction with our API. 

We will inject the `HttpClient` that we get from `@angular/common/http`. To make this working we need to import `HttpClientModule` in our `AppModule`.

We define a `getProducts` and `getProduct` method so we can get a list of products and an single product which we will use in respectively the `ProductList` and `ProductDetail` components. 

In both components we will use the `ngOnInit` lifecycle hook to invoke the methods on the service, and retrieve the data by subscribing to it. 

[Link to product api used in lessons](https://github.com/beeman/egghead-products-api)

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