Best Practices For A Clean And Performant Angular Application

Building maintainable and easy to read applications in this business software world is anything but easy. While developing an Angular application, you need to lay special emphasis on simplifying the code. For this you need to follow the Angular best practices lined out below:

• Unwanted API calls can be avoided by having a caching mechanism in place. This system can assist with the storage of specific value derived out of API and prevent the same information from being downloaded over and over again. Duplication results are also avoided by placing API calls only when needed. This boosts up the application speed by retaining its efficiency even in the unavailability of a stable network.
• You can bring down the code size by using a simple operator in the place of multiple ones. Deploying an incorrect operator can cause the application to behave abnormally. It is thus advisable to opt for the right operator like mergeMap and concatMap while tackling observables.
• Angular APIs are often plagued by bugs and thus require fixes. However, it is commendable to quarantine the API hacks under one roof rather than adding them with the required components. This can collate all the hacks in one place thus easing out its fixation system.
• In spite of being a vast framework, the performance of Angular might deteriorate due to project expansion. You can however boost up the processing speed by ChangingDetectionStrategy to onPush. This sends a signal to the Angular by notifying that the component is dependent only on his own Input. Angular development services can benefit out of lazy loading. This brings down the application size while improving the application boot time.
• Angular CLI can boost up your productivity coupled with its wide variety of commands which can cater to a given task set. The components of Angular CLI references the same automatically into their own modules. Compliance with the naming convention also gets ensured to keep you buffered from having to do the same.
• Angular directives can solve the problems at the very start to prevent future mishaps. Various lint rules can be configured in the tslint.json file. These enforce consistency of application while enhancing its reliability.

• The same code should not be copied in various sections of the codebase. Doing this will make it mandatory to inflict changes in each and every section and thus increase the chances of potential bug occurrences. The testing process gets easier if you have a specific code only at one location.
• HttpClient library can serve as your ultimate answer while handling HTTP requests past Angular 4.3. Apart from its obvious functionality, HttpClient also ushers in numerous benefits. Error handling is facilitated by HttpErrorResponse class of the HttpClient library. Proper access is also granted to the interceptors which assist in listening to various event progresses.
• The trackBy function can be used while looping over a group of templates with the ngFor directive and returning a unique identifier for every single item. trackBy function informs about the specific elements which have undergone changes so that DOM changes can be made for that particular element or group of elements.
• Undesired memory leaks can be caused when an observable stream is left open. This happens especially when the user has navigated to some other page or destroyed the component. In such a scenario, operators like take and takeUntil can be used for unsubscribing the observables. It is also advisable to formulate a lint rule which can detect the unsubscribed observables.
• Pipeable RxJs operators include just the necessary codes when the operators are imported. It also assists with easy identification of unused operators from the files.
• Coupled with an increase in the app size, the quality of your code can deteriorate substantially. It also gets impossible to debug hundreds of components each of which carries their individual state. Centralized state management can solve all your problems in such a scenario.
• You can write more efficient tests by having the business logic as a separate service. This also provides other components with the option of using the logic. You can therefore, reuse your code more as it becomes easy to read.

Conclusion

Application development is an ongoing process which always has room for further improvement. You can however, ease out the development drive of your Angular application by adhering to the practices mentioned above.

Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at Cmarix TechnoLabs, a leading Angular development Company with 13+ years of experience.