↓Skip to main content
  1. Posts/

Tags Input Control for AngularJS

Stay DRY! Don’t waste your time implementing tags input control for AngularJS yourself! There is an excellent AngularJS module for that called “ngTagsInput”. It’s also supports autocomptetion, validations,custom styles and templates. See the demos.

It took me just 10 minutes to add that type of control to my application.

All you need to do is:

  1. Add NPM or Bower dependency
    npm install ng-tags-input --save
    bower install ng-tags-input --save

  1. Include script and CSS to your html page. If you’re using some dependency injection pre-processor like gulp-inject or gulp-ng-inject you don’t need it.

    <script src="angular.js"></script>
<script src="ng-tags-input.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ng-tags-input.css">

  2. declare module dependency:

    angular.module('myApp', ['ngTagsInput'])
    .controller('MyCtrl', function($scope, $http) {
        $scope.tags = [
            { text: 'just' },
            { text: 'some' },
            { text: 'cool' },
            { text: 'tags' }
        ];
        $scope.loadTags = function(query) {
             return $http.get('/tags?query=' + query);
        };
    });

  3. Add input control to html

    <body ng-app="myApp" ng-controller="MyCtrl">
    <tags-input ng-model="tags">
        <auto-complete source="loadTags($query)"></auto-complete>
    </tags-input>
</body>

Pretty simple, isn’t it? The only thing to consider is handling of the tags model. $scope.tags will be an array of objects on the form {text:value}. You may need to transfer them to array of strings:

var tagValues = $scope.tags.map(function(input) {return input.text;});