What's the best way to cancel event propagation between nested ng-click calls?

Question

Here's an example. Let's say I want to have an image overlay like a lot of sites. So when you click a thumbnail, a black overlay appears over your whole window, and a larger version of the image is centered in it. Clicking the black overlay dismisses it; clicking the image will call a function that shows the next image.

The html:

<div ng-controller="OverlayCtrl" class="overlay" ng-click="hideOverlay()">
    <img src="http://some_src" ng-click="nextImage()"/>
</div>

The javascript:

function OverlayCtrl($scope) {
    $scope.hideOverlay = function() {
        // Some code to hdie the overlay
    }
    $scope.nextImage = function() {
        // Some code to find and display the next image
    }
}

The problem is that with this setup, if you click the image, both nextImage() and hideOverlay() are called. But what I want is for only nextImage() to be called.

I know you can capture and cancel the event in the nextImage() function like this:

if (window.event) {
    window.event.stopPropagation();
}

...But I want to know if there's a better AngularJS way of doing it that won't require me to prefix all of the functions on elements inside the overlay with this snippet.

Answer 1

What @JosephSilber said, or pass the $event object into ng-click callback and stop the propagation inside of it:

<div ng-controller="OverlayCtrl" class="overlay" ng-click="hideOverlay()">
  <img src="http://some_src" ng-click="nextImage($event)"/>
</div>

$scope.nextImage = function($event) {
  $event.stopPropagation();
  // Some code to find and display the next image
}

Answer 2

Use $event.stopPropagation():

<div ng-controller="OverlayCtrl" class="overlay" ng-click="hideOverlay()">
    <img src="http://some_src" ng-click="nextImage(); $event.stopPropagation()" />
</div>

Here's a demo: http://plnkr.co/edit/3Pp3NFbGxy30srl8OBmQ?p=preview

Answer 3

I like the idea of using a directive for this:

.directive('stopEvent', function () {
    return {
        restrict: 'A',
        link: function (scope, element, attr) {
            element.bind('click', function (e) {
                e.stopPropagation();
            });
        }
    };
 });

Then use the directive like:

<div ng-controller="OverlayCtrl" class="overlay" ng-click="hideOverlay()">
    <img src="http://some_src" ng-click="nextImage()" stop-event/>
</div>

If you wanted, you could make this solution more generic like this answer to a different question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14547223/347216

Answer 4

Sometimes, it may make most sense just to do this:

<widget ng-click="myClickHandler(); $event.stopPropagation()"/>

I chose to do it this way because I didn't want myClickHandler() to stop the event propagation in the many other places it was used.

Sure, I could've added a boolean parameter to the handler function, but stopPropagation() is much more meaningful than just true.

Answer 5

This works for me:

<a href="" ng-click="doSomething($event)">Action</a>

this.doSomething = function($event) {
  $event.stopPropagation();
  $event.preventDefault();
};

Answer 6

If you don't want to have to add the stop propagation to all links this works as well. A bit more scalable.

$scope.hideOverlay( $event ){

   // only hide the overlay if we click on the actual div
   if( $event.target.className.indexOf('overlay') ) 
      // hide overlay logic

}

Answer 7

If you insert ng-click="$event.stopPropagation" on the parent element of your template, the stopPropogation will be caught as it bubbles up the tree, so you only have to write it once for your entire template.

Answer 8

You can register another directive on top of ng-click which amends the default behaviour of ng-click and stops the event propagation. This way you wouldn't have to add $event.stopPropagation by hand.

app.directive('ngClick', function() {
    return {
        restrict: 'A',
        compile: function($element, attr) {
            return function(scope, element, attr) {
                element.on('click', function(event) {
                    event.stopPropagation();
                });
            };
        }
    }
});

Answer 9

<div ng-click="methodName(event)"></div>

IN controller use

$scope.methodName = function(event) { 
    event.stopPropagation();
}

Answer 10

In my case event.stopPropagation(); was making my page refresh each time I pressed on a link so I had to find another solution.

So what I did was to catch the event on the parent and block the trigger if it was actually coming from his child using event.target.

Here is the solution:

if (!angular.element($event.target).hasClass('some-unique-class-from-your-child')) ...

So basically your ng-click from your parent component works only if you clicked on the parent. If you clicked on the child it won't pass this condition and it won't continue it's flow.