Everyone (who’s used angular or seen an angular tutorial) has seen the awesome realtime angular search. This is used with a filter property, but there are more complex things you can use with filtering. On my Hack Reactor hackathon project I used filtering for just about everything. From picking out individual objects to finding just the right combinations and I learned some awesome tricks and some pitfalls to avoid.

One of the coolest things you can do is filter by lots of things together. The filter ends up looking a lot like a JavaScript object:

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filter:{TEXT: text, notes: noted, category: category}

They way this works the best is if you have a number of searches all on one page to pull together. Say a regular text search (text above) that needs to interact with a drop down menu filter (category). Just throw all the variables into one object and filter on that.

Another neat thing you can do is filter by IDs. For example, if you want to have individual pages for each item, you can normally just call to it based on the $index of that item. But what if you have searched and filtered your list of data into a more manageable grouping? Index doesn’t work! It’s pulling the index of the new filtered list and not the actual index that data point has in the entire data structure.

My fun work around for this was to send the object that you had selected to a function within my Angular controller for that page and find the data that way.

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$scope.add = function(website){
    $rootScope.selected = $rootScope.selected || [];
    if($rootScope.selected.indexOf(website) === -1){
        $rootScope.selected.push(website);
    }
};

Of course this requires something in the $rootScope, but that also benefited me because I wanted to have access on a separate page to all of the data points a user chose. That way I could fill out a detailed report of the chosen bookmarks with user defined notes all on one screen.

If I didn’t know me better I’d say I was a little manic this week compared to last. This week I was cold, tired and hungry most of the time. I had my ups, down and whiny moments. My credit card was blocked because apparently the soda machine in the mall is shady to my bank. It was a quick fix, until my Clipper Card (the way I pay for my train - which I take every day, twice a day) ended up being blocked because it had tried to autoload cash during the 3 hour window of downtime on my credit card. It takes up to a week to reprocess so I’m forced to buy crappy little paper tickets and not use the $30 I already had stored on my train card. I ended up buying a coat and neon pink gloves just to make me happy (and warmer). Allow me to be a woman for a moment and do a bit of style blogging:

I obviously didn’t spend all my time buying cheap, warm clothing though. I spent most of my time in class having moments of excitement followed by moments of wanting to crawl under a desk and take a nap. I’m not sure what I’d do without the upcoming Christmas break, but it wouldn’t be pretty. What I will say instead is that I may have found my niche in programming.

This week was all about ‘backend’ which means pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a lot of the behind the scenes decisions that have to happen to decide what page you’re looking for and what data to put there. We did more Node.js servering and powered through different types of databases and how to hook them in and beat them into a format we can use well enough with our front-end JavaScripting (the answer is JSON, for the viewers at home). Finally, when I thought I couldn’t take any more (and I was half right), we started on Angular, another MV* framework like Backbone.js, but with some magic and some sleight of hand that allows you to do most of the work directly on the HTML.

I lurve the backend. I really find page routing and JSON calls and database building/retrieving from to be super interesting. It almost feels like a tangible thing where the app over the top is just a pretty cover for the awesomeness that makes it all happen.

We start our lives as Software Engineers next week - a short two-day solo project sprint followed by the start of our first group project. I’m super excited to have a bit more freedom. I’m also terrified of working on my own and having it crash and burn. I really hope excitement wins out.

After the solo project I hope I can write-up a bit about my experiences and show off my (crappy?) solo app.