Angular - Components within Components

It’s good to be back blogging after a long hiatus. :-)

With the earlier versions of Angular creating nested components was not possible but with Angular6+ you can create nested components within components. Here’s how you can create them using the angular-cli. You can also perform the steps manually by creating the needed files one by one under a hierarchical structure as shown below.

Let’s take a look at an example of what we are trying to create.

Why nest Angular Components?

Let’s say we have a “Shopping” feature (as shown in this example below) and we want to have sub-components such as “Shopping-List”, “Shopping-List-Edit” option and so on. Traditionally, you would have created that as a flat list of components all organized under the /app directory. But as the project grows or as you have more team-members added to your project, you project gets more complex and you end up with too many files under /app directory making it difficult to manage and support. So having a hierarchical structure for your components makes sense. This also creates a mental visual as to how each of the components are related.

Here is how you will create the nested components under Angular (using the Angular-cli)


// long-form, generates shopping component artifacts
ng generate component shopping
// short-form
ng g c shopping
// Create shopping-list below shopping
// Generates shopping-list artifacts under shopping component
ng g c shopping/shopping-list

// ** Complex Use-Case - Adding Components Into A Different Module **

// Using components with same name (not recommended)
// Let's say you had multiple modules,
// where you may have app.module.ts and leftnav.module.ts
// and you wanted to create this about-us under each module but
// use the same name then you can do the following
ng g c shopping/about-us --module=app.module
ng g c left-nav/about-us --module=leftnav.module
// This will add the newly created components as a member of that particular module.

It’s that simple.

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Now for Today’s Inspiration:

Three Steps In Cultivating Willpower:

  1. Finish what you begin.
  2. Do a little bit more than you think you can.
  3. Do a little bit better than you think you can.

Cheers!