Ng Mentions

Simple Angular mentions inspired by Ment.io & Angular Mentions.

Provides auto-complete suggestions for @mentions in text input fields, text areas, and content editable fields (content editable support is currently limited).

This is still a work in progress. Expect breaking changes, although I will try to minimize them for the common use cases.

To install and start the demo application:

git clone https://github.com/james-schwartzkopf/ng-mentions.git
cd ng-mentions
yarn
ng build ng-mentions
ng serve demo-material --port 4200
ng serve demo-bootstrap --port 4201

Usage

Add the package as a dependency to your project using:

yarn add ng-mentions

Add the @angular/cdk:

yarn add @angular/cdk

Import the CDK overlay CSS in your src/styles.css or src/styles.scss file:

@import "~@angular/cdk/overlay-prebuilt.css";

Add the module to your app.module imports:

import { NgMentionsModule } from 'ng-mentions';
...

@NgModule({
    imports: [ NgMentionsModule ],
    ...
})

Add the [mentionWatcher] directive to your input element:

<textarea type="text" [mentionWatcher]="peopleList"></textarea>

Where peopleList is a component. For example:

<mention-list #peopleList>
  <ul class="people-list">
    <li [mentionItem]="'john.lennon'">John Lennon</li>
    <li [mentionItem]="'paul.mccartney'">Paul McCartney</li>
    <li [mentionItem]="'george.harrison'">George Harrison</li>
    <li [mentionItem]="'ringo.starr'">Ringo Starr</li>
  </ul>
</mention-list>

Add some CSS to style the dropdown panel:

ul.people-list {
  background-color: white;
  border: black solid 1px;
  list-style: none;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

ul.people-list li {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 4px
}

ul.people-list li:hover  {
  background-color: lightgrey;
}

ul.people-list li.active  {
  background-color: lightskyblue;
}

Type the '@' character and the dropdown list should appear.

You can use the MentionList.mentionTerm$ observable to filter your list:

  @ViewChild(MentionList) peopleList: MentionList;
  public matches$: Observable<{name: string; handle: string}[]>;
  ngAfterViewInit() {
    this.matches$ = this.peopleList.mentionTerm$.pipe(
      map(t => this.people.filter(p => p.handle.indexOf(t) > -1))
    );
  }

  private people = [
    { handle: 'john.lennon', name: 'John Lennon'},
    { handle: 'paul.mccartney', name: 'Paul McCartney'},
    { handle: 'george.harrison', name: 'George Harrison'},
    { handle: 'ringo.starr', name: 'Ringo Starr'},
  ];

<mention-list #peopleList>
  <ul class="people-list">
    <li *ngFor="let person of matches$ | async"
      [mentionItem]="person.handle"
    >
      {{person.name}}
    </li>
  </ul>
</mention-list>

You can change the character used for mentions:

<mention-list #songList mentionChar="#">
  <ul class="song-list">
    <li [mentionItem]="'come-together'">Come Together</li>
    <li [mentionItem]="'let-it-be'">Let It Be</li>
    <li [mentionItem]="'yesterday'">Yesterday</li>
    <li [mentionItem]="'strawberry-fields'">Strawberry Fields Forever</li>
  </ul>
</mention-list>

You can have multiple on a single watcher:

<textarea type="text" [mentionWatcher]="[peopleList, songList]"></textarea>

The mentionParser and mentionReplacer attributes can be used to customize how mentions are parsed.

  //TODO example of custom parser/replacer

More Examples

See the demo-material & demo-bootstrap examples in the workspace repo for examples of how to create mention list using the respective frameworks.

Custom Content Editable Support

The included support for content editable is currently very limited. It does not support replacing with anything but text, searching across HTML tags, etc. It also does not support IFRAMEs (TinyMCE).

It does however have an interface that allows for creating customized input support. See the MentionInputHelper interface. The ContentEditableMentionInputHelper and TextInputMentionInputHelper classes can be used as examples of how to implement the interface.

Adding support for TinyMCE should mostly be a matter of tweaking ContentEditableMentionInputHelper so that getBoundingRectProvider accounts for the IFRAME, and changing the source event streams for watchEvents$.

TODO

This is still a work in progress.

1 Improve & finalize MentionInputHelper interface. 2) Unit & e2e tests 3) Improve @angular/material support 4) Better documentation 5) Finalize Component/Directive input/outputs 6) Better parsers 7) Improve contentEditable support 8) Support for TinyMCE 9) Suggestions welcome