A Quick Guide To Angular Pipes
Impressive web development is the result of a successful synergy of robust back-end and an appealing front-end. Usually, the back-end is thought to be the ‘brains’ of a webpage and the front-end is merely the shiny exterior. However, with the right front-end development framework, powerful computations can happen directly on the front-end as well. Angular happens to be one of such impressive front-end development frameworks. Through its templates, Angular offers the opportunity for data to be processed and formatted in a certain way right there in the HTML code. This is made possible through functions with easy-to-understand syntax and usage, and they are called pipes.
This article will serve as a quick guide to tell you all the meaty stuff to know about pipes and how to effectively use them. Pipes come in various types and can significantly simplify data collection and processing in use cases where the front-end is the main gateway of obtaining the data. The article will also discuss how pipes are tested during the unit testing of Angular applications (which is not as difficult as it may seem for some).
The Ins And Outs Of Angular Pipes
Before moving on to discussing Angular pipes, it is imperative to understand what Angular components and templates are. Pipes are present in the template part of the component, making it necessary to understand the former to grasp the utility of the latter.
Angular applications are fundamentally made up of units called components. Each component is centered around a certain functionality or visual aspect of the application. These components are self-contained and consist of both its working logic along with instructions about its visual rendering. The latter is stored in what are called templates. Templates are simply HTML code that can be in the form of a separate file or inline code within the @Component decorator (which is written in TypeScript). An example of an Angular component can be seen below.