Added "recycle" option to open

[dboydor]

To support using ngDialog in a wizard context, I wanted to prevent the unsightly flash of successive dialogs being closed, then opened again.

The solution I came up with, reuses the dialog in-place for a given dialog id. You don't call "close" on the dialog, you just pass a "recycle: [dialogid]" parameter to the "open" call and it will reuse the existing dialog in-place with the new template and controller.

This may not be right for inclusion into ngDialog, but it might be helpful for someone else who wants to support this use case.

[davidvuong]

Hey @dboydor,

I needed the same wizard-like functionality with ngDialog a while ago too. My solution at the time was to maintain states within the template and have ng-show and ng-click to switch between them. So for example:

<div ng-show="!state || state === 'step-1'">
  <button ng-click="state = 'step-2'">next</button>
<div>

<div ng-show="state === 'step-2'">
  <button ng-click="state = 'step-1'">back</button>
</div>

The dialog is created once and you stop having to worry about flashing because you're not closing the dialog here either. You're just toggling on and off steps in the wizard.

I like your solution 👍 but I think it might be a bit tricky to keep bugs at bay when we're re-using existing dialogs. For example I think I spot a bug (I might be wrong here), but it looks like dialogsCount is always incremented even though you might be re-using the same dialog.

@egor-smirnov What do you think?

[dboydor]

@egor-smirnov,

I considered doing it the way you suggest (we're using something like it elsewhere) but in this case, we had a hacked route-based dialog solution with a deep branching tree. It would have been painful to merge all that together.

With this solution, I was able to keep the templates and controllers pretty much as-is.

Thanks for noticing the bug! I'll check that out. I'm sure there are others because I'm not using all the features (like resolve) that ngDialog supports and I pretty much ignore those in the reuse case.

[egor-smirnov]

@dboydor I guess you meant @davidvuong, not me, am I correct? Because I wasn't involved in this discussion by this moment, and haven't reviewed it.

[dboydor]

Oh yes! I saw "@egor-smirnov What do you think?" and I thought that was a signature line with him asking me for my comment.

@davidvuong instead

[davidvuong]

Hey @dboydor,

Sorry I haven't been responsive lately. I've been a bit sick (Aussie weather is sporadic ATM) and had been busy with other projects. If this is a use case you need and can't be easily solved by the method I suggested above then I'd be happy to merge your changes in! We just have to hashed out some of the obvious bugs.

[egor-smirnov]

@davidvuong thank you for your involvement and get well!

You could just work on this PR without asking my opinion. Feel free to merge / discuss on your own.

[davidvuong]

@egor-smirnov will do and thanks!

[davidvuong]

I'm going to close this PR as there hasn't been any activity in over 2 weeks. There are still bugs in the PR and I don't currently have the time to extend it. I'll gladly re-open this later if anyone feels that this feature needs to be incorporated into the library.