Is there a way to make AngularJS load partials in the beginning and not at when needed?

I have a route setup like this:

var myApp = angular.module('myApp', []).
    config(['$routeProvider', function ($routeProvider) {
    $routeProvider.
        when('/landing', {
            templateUrl: '/landing-partial',
            controller: landingController
        }).
        when('/:wkspId/query', {
            templateUrl: '/query-partial',
            controller: queryController
        }).
        otherwise({
            redirectTo: '/landing'
        });
}]);

I want to be able to make angularjs download both the partials in the beginning and not when requested.

Is it possible?

Yes, there are at least 2 solutions for this:

  1. Use the script directive (http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:script) to put your partials in the initially loaded HTML
  2. You could also fill in $templateCache (http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$templateCache) from JavaScript if needed (possibly based on result of $http call)

If you would like to use method (2) to fill in $templateCache you can do it like this:

$templateCache.put('second.html', '<b>Second</b> template');

Of course the templates content could come from a $http call:

$http.get('third.html', {cache:$templateCache});

Here is the plunker those techniques: http://plnkr.co/edit/J6Y2dc?p=preview

If you use Grunt to build your project, there is a plugin that will automatically assemble your partials into an Angular module that primes $templateCache. You can concatenate this module with the rest of your code and load everything from one file on startup.

https://npmjs.org/package/grunt-html2js

If you wrap each template in a script tag, eg:

<script id="about.html" type="text/ng-template">
<div>
    <h3>About</h3>
    This is the About page
    Its cool!
</div>
</script>

Concatenate all templates into 1 big file. If using Visual Studio 2013, download Web essentials - it adds a right click menu to create an HTML Bundle.

Add the code that this guy wrote to change the angular $templatecache service - its only a small piece of code and it works: Vojta Jina's Gist

Its the $http.get that should be changed to use your bundle file:

allTplPromise = $http.get('templates/templateBundle.min.html').then(

Your routes templateUrl should look like this:

        $routeProvider.when(
            "/about", {
                controller: "",
                templateUrl: "about.html"
            }
        );

Add a build task to concatenate and register your html partials in the Angular $templateCache. (This answer is a more detailed variant of karlgold's answer.)

For grunt, use grunt-angular-templates. For gulp, use gulp-angular-templatecache.

Below are config/code snippets to illustrate.

gruntfile.js Example:

ngtemplates: {
  app: {                
    src: ['app/partials/**.html', 'app/views/**.html'],
    dest: 'app/scripts/templates.js'
  },
  options: {
    module: 'myModule'
  }
}

gulpfile.js Example:

var templateCache = require('gulp-angular-templatecache');
var paths = ['app/partials/.html', 'app/views/.html'];

gulp.task('createTemplateCache', function () {
return gulp.src(paths)
    .pipe(templateCache('templates.js', { module: 'myModule', root:'app/views'}))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('app/scripts'));
    });

templates.js (this file is autogenerated by the build task)

$templateCache.put('app/views/main.html', "<div class=\"main\">\r"...

index.html

<script src="app/scripts/templates.js"></script>
<div ng-include ng-controller="main as vm" src="'app/views/main.html'"></div>

If you use rails, you can use the asset pipeline to compile and shove all your haml/erb templates into a template module which can be appended to your application.js file. Checkout http://minhajuddin.com/2013/04/28/angularjs-templates-and-rails-with-eager-loading

I just use eco to do the job for me. eco is supported by Sprockets by default. It's a shorthand for Embedded Coffeescript which takes a eco file and compile into a Javascript template file, and the file will be treated like any other js files you have in your assets folder.

All you need to do is to create a template with extension .jst.eco and write some html code in there, and rails will automatically compile and serve the file with the assets pipeline, and the way to access the template is really easy: JST['path/to/file']({var: value}); where path/to/file is based on the logical path, so if you have file in /assets/javascript/path/file.jst.eco, you can access the template at JST['path/file']()

To make it work with angularjs, you can pass it into the template attribute instead of templateDir, and it will start working magically!