Avoid timeout and others

[julianobrasil]

Is it possible to avoid the setTimeout? As you plan a future PR in material 2 repo, the team avoids using setTimeout's.

https://github.com/OasisDigital/angular-material-obs-autocomplete/blob/b5e1a5fdd43b7a8e0391760e84acb2b26c97fc52/src/app/obs-autocomplete/obs-autocomplete-base.ts#L42-L49

You could take a look in MatAutocompleteTrigger.panelClosingActions as it's shown over here: angular/components#3334 (comment)

Also, there are recommendations about coding in Material repo: https://github.com/angular/material2/blob/master/CODING_STANDARDS.md

I've noticed the code style is a very important aspect among the guys developing Material. Tests are mandatory. You'll have to write them.

And, above all that... ask them whether you should be doing it before spending time preparing your PR. Not all features in Material Repo are opened for direct contribution. This kind of feature seems to me it's something that should be part of the project core. So there's a guideline that any core feature must be exhaustively discussed (internally to Google). Force selection is in this step (you can be sure that a topic with more than 40 comments is not being ignored by the project leader, Jeremy).

Rejecting PR's is not so frequent, but if your work is out of sync with their timeline, it can be frozen for months or even years awaiting for a merging action (and it's possible that you'll have to rebase it then).

Dispite of all this bureaucracy thing, I think your component is very nice, and your examples are really great (but the setTimeout thing... I don't like the idea of counting on timing to take actions - even in this case, where aparently you are just pushing the subscription to the end of the line in the event loop).

[edited]: shouldn't it be this.selectedValueSub = this.selectedValue.pipe(...

[kylecordes]

@julianobrasil Thank you for this excellent feedback!

About the setTimeout(), I have studied this and found that it is not necessary after all. So it is now removed.

I was curious how the Material team avoids setTimeout(), so I searched the code and found that it's actually used somewhat widely. I see the desire to avoid it, but it is not always avoidable, apparently.

About testing, I have been thinking about how to effectively auto-test this code. Right now it is incidentally tested because we use it in various "real work" downstream. But I would like to have a way to test it automatically right here in this repo.

About the notion of a PR - I have constructed this so far to live in "user space" - nowhere near being eligible as a PR. It is not a fork of Angular Material; it does not add any new component as a "peer" of the existing components; etc. Rather, I mentioned originally the idea of a PR for two reasons:

• If there is any slice of this work which could be useful as a PR, some small bit of it that might be a candidate for inclusion somewhere, then sure, I am happy to help.
• Maybe a glance at this will provide some modicum of inspiration for an official design process. For example, I have read the design document for the mat-table at length, and putting that together with my experience here, suggests that the DataSource idea might be applicable to this control also (I have made this code use that concept)

About the selectedValueSub - actually that is intentionally omitted from the line you mentioned, both before and after my removal of setTimeout(). It turns out that the asynchronicity of a control like this is a big painful reality. I need better tests to show why this particular bit is necessary. The take(1) ensures the subscription does not last very long and does not leak anything long-term.

[julianobrasil]

I see the desire to avoid it, but it is not always avoidable, apparently.

Yeah... one thing is what you want... other thing is what is possible to do. 😄

I have constructed this so far to live in "user space"

Oh, now it makes sense. The code seems to be very very organized, but to live in this "user space".

suggests that the DataSource idea might be applicable to this control also

Your code express very well the aplicability of this pattern to this kind of component

I have a lot of autocompletes in some of my projects. All of them making undesired use of setTimeout's and I was waiting for the team to merge Krystian's PR to start replacing them.

As it goes to production environment in the university where I work (I'm a professor in Electrical Engineering course, who accidentaly fell in love with software development), I've imposed to myself to just use "long term" pure angular libraries. Right now I'm using:

• material
• dragula: I will likely replace it in 2018 as soon as Material team releases the drag-and-drop features
• ncstate-sat/popover: based on cdkOverlay, if you don't know it and need a popover (currently out of scope of Material Project), you must visit this repo: https://github.com/ncstate-sat/popover
• ngx-pagination: I'm about take it away in favor of MatPaginator

As I refactor my autocompletes, if you wish, I can try out your angular-material-obs-autocomplete and let you know more about my impressions on the usability.

[kylecordes]

@julianobrasil I would be thrilled if you would try my component in an application and send me your feedback about the functionality and developer ergonomics. We have several people using it here at work already, but they have the advantage of being able to talk with the person who wrote the code all the time (me), so the feedback from them probably doesn't fully capture whatever difficulties there are in using the code.

Our strategy here is very similar to yours, we avoid mixing in ad hoc non-angular JavaScript code is much as we possibly can, and similarly use as much as possible, the official Angular libraries.

No professors here, but I have personally taught several hundred people Angular, and our group here has taught thousands. ( https://angularbootcamp.com/ )

[julianobrasil]

That's awesome. Let this issue open so I can use it to give you a feedback in a few days.

[kylecordes]

(Anyone with any similar feedback or questions, please feel free to open a new issue!)