AngularUI: Handling Mouseover Events for Google Maps Markers


The Problem:

Welcome back to another episode of Continuous Improvement, the podcast where we explore strategies and techniques to continuously improve our skills and overcome challenges. I’m your host, Victor, and in today’s episode, we’ll be discussing a common problem that many developers face when working with Google Maps in AngularUI.

So, imagine you’re working on a project that involves displaying multiple markers on a Google Map. You want to add mouseover events to these markers, but you realize that the AngularUI documentation is a bit vague on how to achieve this. This confusion led me to dive deeper into the problem and find a solution, which I’ll be sharing with you today.

The initial approach specified in the documentation is straightforward for a single marker. You simply need to add the events property to the ui-gmap-marker directive in your HTML, like this:

<ui-gmap-marker events="marker.events"></ui-gmap-marker>

Then, in your controller, you can define the marker object with the desired event callbacks, such as mouseover. It looks something like this:

$scope.marker = {
  events: {
    mouseover: function (marker, eventName, args) {
      // Callback code here
    }
  }
};

This works perfectly fine if you only have a single marker. But what if you have multiple markers and you want to attach mouseover events to all of them? That’s where the confusion kicks in.

After some trial and error, I discovered a workaround that allows you to add mouseover events to multiple markers on the Google Map using AngularUI. Here’s what you need to do:

First, in your HTML, within the markers directive, add the following attribute:

events="clickEventsObject"

This attribute serves as a reference to an object that contains the event callbacks for your markers. Let’s call it clickEventsObject for now.

Moving on to the controller, you need to define the clickEventsObject and specify your event callbacks. For example:

$scope.clickEventsObject = {
  mouseover: markerMouseOver,
  mouseout: markerMouseOut
};

function markerMouseOver(marker, e) {
  // Callback code here
}

function markerMouseOut(marker, e) {
  // Callback code here
}

By binding the events attribute in the HTML to the clickEventsObject, you can now attach the desired event callbacks to each marker.

And voila! You can now enjoy the benefits of mouseover events on multiple markers in Google Maps using AngularUI. It’s a simple yet effective solution that gives you the flexibility you need.

And that concludes today’s episode of Continuous Improvement. I hope this solution helps you in your own projects and saves you some confusion and frustration. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes, feel free to reach out to me at victorleungtw@gmail.com.

Thank you for tuning in, and don’t forget to keep improving every day. Until next time!