DEV Community

Adrian Matei for CodepediaOrg

Posted on • Originally published at codepedia.org

1 1

How to verify link clicked in Angular html template

Being on a constant lookout for optimisation when managing my bookmarks on www.bookmarks.dev, I had this idea lately to add a bookmark to my history not only when I click the title of the bookmark (main URL), but also when I click hyperlinks in the description of the bookmark - sometimes I tend to bookmark the "parent" url and add "child" or related bookmarks in the description (an example would be bookmarking the same "resource" which is deployed on different environments like dev, test and prod):

Demo showing this in action

This plays really well now with the recently introduced hot keys to access the history and pinned bookmarks

Well, let's see how this looks like in code:

The HTML template

    <app-bookmark-text
      [bookmark]="bookmark"
      [queryText]="queryText"
      (click)="onClickInDescription($event, bookmark)"
      (auxclick)="onMiddleClickInDescription($event, bookmark)"
      (contextmenu)="onRightClickInDescription($event, bookmark)">
    </app-bookmark-text>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

In the template we listen to the following events the Angular API provides:

  • onClick - fires when the user clicks the left mouse button on the object
  • onauxclick - to cover the middle button click of the mouse I use the auxclick1 event, which is fired at an Element when a non-primary pointing device button (any mouse button other than the primary—usually leftmost—button) has been pressed and released both within the same element.fires when the user clicks the left mouse button on the object
  • oncontextmenu - fires when the user clicks the right mouse button in the client area, opening the context menu.

The Angular component

Let's see how this is implemented in the component:

  onClickInDescription($event: any, bookmark: Bookmark) {
    if (this.isHtmlAnchorElement($event)) {
      $event.target.setAttribute('target', '_blank');
      this.addToHistoryIfLoggedIn(bookmark);
    }
  }

  onRightClickInDescription($event: any, bookmark: Bookmark) {
    if (this.isHtmlAnchorElement($event)) {
      this.addToHistoryIfLoggedIn(bookmark);
    }
  }

  onMiddleClickInDescription($event: any, bookmark: Bookmark) {
    if (this.isHtmlAnchorElement($event)) {
      this.addToHistoryIfLoggedIn(bookmark);
    }
  }

  private isHtmlAnchorElement($event: any) {
    return $event.target.matches('a');
  }
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The pattern is the same: verify that the object onto which the event was dispatched is an HTML Anchor - isHtmlAnchorElement(). If that's the case it will be added to my bookmarks history.

To achieve that, we use the target2 property of the Event interface with the matches(selector)3 method. In this particular case we use a as selectorString. For other html elements use a corresponding selector.

Note:

  • on left click we force opening the URL in a new tab by setting the target attribute to _blank - $event.target.setAttribute('target', '_blank');
  • on right click I haven't found a way yet to verify if the user clicked "Open Link in New Tab" or "Open Link in New Window" - suggestions are more than welcomed; but for the time being I think it is enough, what else would you do a right click on a link for?

Conclusion

This is definitely a piece of code I will bookmark for later.

References


  1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/auxclick_event 

  2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/target 

  3. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/matches 

Sentry blog image

How I fixed 20 seconds of lag for every user in just 20 minutes.

Our AI agent was running 10-20 seconds slower than it should, impacting both our own developers and our early adopters. See how I used Sentry Profiling to fix it in record time.

Read more

Top comments (0)

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs