angular-shepherd

angular-shepherd is built and maintained by Ship Shape. Contact us for web app consulting, development, and training for your project.

This is an Angular wrapper for the Shepherd, site tour, library. It provides additional functionality, on top of Shepherd, as well.

Compatibility

This has not been tested in anything but Angular 8+. It may or may not work in previous versions or subsequent versions of Angular. We would love to support multiple versions, if people with more Angular knowledge would be willing to help us out!

Installation

npm install angular-shepherd --save

Usage

NOTE: This may not be the proper Angular way to do everything, as I am not an Angular dev, so please let me know if you have suggestions!

Then, you will need to inject the ShepherdService to be able to interact with Shepherd and call addSteps to add your steps, start to start the tour, etc.

You could either do this at the application level, in your application component or on a per component or per route/view basis.

In that component you will want to use AfterViewInit to addSteps to the Shepherd service.

import { Component, AfterViewInit } from '@angular/core';
import { ShepherdService } from 'angular-shepherd';
import { steps as defaultSteps, defaultStepOptions} from '../data';

@Component({
  selector: 'shepherd',
  templateUrl: './shepherd.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./shepherd.component.css']
})
export class ShepherdComponent implements AfterViewInit {

  constructor(private shepherdService: ShepherdService) { }

  ngAfterViewInit() {
    this.shepherdService.defaultStepOptions = defaultStepOptions;
    this.shepherdService.disableScroll = true;
    this.shepherdService.modal = true;
    this.shepherdService.confirmCancel = false;
    this.shepherdService.addSteps(defaultSteps);
    this.shepherdService.start();
  }
}

Configuration

The following configuration options can be set on the ShepherdService to control the way that Shepherd is used. The only required option is steps, which is set via addSteps.

confirmCancel

confirmCancel is a boolean flag, when set to true it will pop up a native browser confirm window on cancel, to ensure you want to cancel.

confirmCancelMessage

confirmCancelMessage is a string to display in the confirm dialog when confirmCancel is set to true.

defaultStepOptions

defaultStepOptions is used to set the options that will be applied to each step by default. You can pass in any of the options that you can with Shepherd.

⚠️ You must set defaultStepOptions BEFORE calling addSteps to set the steps.

It will be an object of a form something like:

this.shepherdService.defaultStepOptions = {
  classes: 'custom-class-name-1 custom-class-name-2',
  scrollTo: false,
  showCancelLink: true
};

default value: {}

requiredElements

requiredElements is an array of objects that indicate DOM elements that are REQUIRED by your tour and must exist and be visible for the tour to start. If any elements are not present, it will keep the tour from starting.

You can also specify a message, which will tell the user what they need to do to make the tour work.

⚠️ You must set requiredElements BEFORE calling addSteps to set the steps.

Example

this.shepherdService.requiredElements = [
  {
    selector: '.search-result-element',
    message: 'No search results found. Please execute another search, and try to start the tour again.',
    title: 'No results'
  },
  {
    selector: '.username-element',
    message: 'User not logged in, please log in to start this tour.',
    title: 'Please login'
  },
];

default value: []

disableScroll

disableScroll is a boolean, that when set to true, will keep the user from scrolling with the scrollbar, mousewheel, arrow keys, etc. You may want to use this to ensure you are driving the scroll position with the tour.

default value: false

modal

modal is a boolean, that should be set to true, if you would like the rest of the screen, other than the current element, greyed out, and the current element highlighted. If you do not need modal functionality, you can remove this option or set it to false.

default value: false

addSteps

You must pass an array of steps to addSteps, something like this:

this.shepherdService.addSteps([
  {
    id: 'intro',
    options: {
      attachTo: '.first-element bottom',
      beforeShowPromise: function() {
        return new Promise(function(resolve) {
          setTimeout(function() {
            window.scrollTo(0, 0);
            resolve();
          }, 500);
        });
      },
      buttons: [
        {
          classes: 'shepherd-button-secondary',
          text: 'Exit',
          type: 'cancel'
        },
        {
          classes: 'shepherd-button-primary',
          text: 'Back',
          type: 'back'
        },
        {
          classes: 'shepherd-button-primary',
          text: 'Next',
          type: 'next'
        }
      ],
      classes: 'custom-class-name-1 custom-class-name-2',
      highlightClass: 'highlight',
      scrollTo: false,
      showCancelLink: true,
      title: 'Welcome to Angular-Shepherd!',
      text: ['Angular-Shepherd is a JavaScript library for guiding users through your Angular app.'],
      when: {
        show: () => {
          console.log('show step');
        },
        hide: () => {
          console.log('hide step');
        }
      }
    }
  },
  ...
]);

A lot of the options are the same as Shepherd options, but I will go through each of them for reference.

attachTo

The selector and position for the tour popup to attach to, of the format 'selector position'. Position options are: top, bottom, left, and right. Can also be an object formatted like

{
  element: '.myElement',
  on: 'top'
}

Where .myElement is any valid jQuery selector.

default value: ''

beforeShowPromise

A function that returns a promise. When the promise resolves, the rest of the show code for the step will execute.

default value: null

buttons

There are some standard button types supported by angular-shepherd. Just set type to 'next', 'back', or 'cancel', then set the text and classes as normal. These will automatically be bound to the Shepherd functions. If no type is passed, a normal Shepherd button will be created.

classes

Extra classes to apply to the step, for styling purposes and such.

default value: ''

canClickTarget

Whether or not the target element being attached to should be "clickable". If set to false, Angular Shepherd sets the element's pointerEvents style to none while the step is active.

default value: true

highlightClass

This is an extra class to apply to the attachTo element when it is highlighted (that is, when its step is active). It can be any string. Just style that class name in your CSS.

default value: ``

id

The name to give this step of the tour

scrollTo

This sets whether or not the screen should be scrolled to get to the element when the step becomes active.

default value: false

scrollToHandler

For custom scrolling actions, pass a function to this option. For example:

  let scrollHandler = (el) => {
    let winHeight = $(window).height();
    // Target vertical middle scroll position
    let targetPos = ($(el).offset().top + $(el).position().top) - (winHeight / 2);
    // Animate scrolling with Velocity.js, for example.
    $('#main-scroll-container').velocity({ top: targetPos }, 1000, "swing");
  };

  let steps = [
    {id: 'intro',
     options: {
        attachTo: '#first-item left',
        title: 'Welcome!',
        text: ["Have we met before?"],
        scrollTo: true,
        scrollToHandler: scrollHandler
      }
    }
  ];

default value: null

showCancelLink

When true, an x will appear in the top right of the popup, for canceling the tour.

default value: false

title

The step's title. It becomes an h3 at the top of the step.

default value: ''

tippyOptions

Extra options to pass to Tippy.

default value: null

text

The text content to display in the tour popup. Can be:

• a string
• an HTML element
• a function returning any of the above

default value: null

when

An object containing functions to be executed when events occur on the step.
Supported events are before-show, show, before-hide, hide, complete, cancel, and destroy.

  when: {
    show: function() {
      window.scrollTo(0, 0);
    }
  }

default value: null