@angular/animations

What is @angular/animations?

The @angular/animations package provides powerful animation capabilities and tools to Angular applications. It allows developers to define complex animations and transitions in a declarative manner, directly within their Angular components.

What are @angular/animations's main functionalities?

Trigger and state-based animations

This feature allows defining animations based on triggers and states. The example shows an animation trigger named 'openClose' with two states, 'open' and 'closed', and transitions between these states with different styles and durations.

import { trigger, state, style, animate, transition } from '@angular/animations';

@Component({
  selector: 'my-component',
  templateUrl: 'my-component.html',
  animations: [
    trigger('openClose', [
      state('open', style({
        height: '200px',
        opacity: 1,
        backgroundColor: 'yellow'
      })),
      state('closed', style({
        height: '100px',
        opacity: 0.5,
        backgroundColor: 'green'
      })),
      transition('open => closed', [
        animate('1s')
      ]),
      transition('closed => open', [
        animate('0.5s')
      ]),
    ]),
  ]
})
export class MyComponent {
  isOpen = true;

  toggle() {
    this.isOpen = !this.isOpen;
  }
}

Animation callbacks

Animation callbacks allow you to listen for when an animation starts and ends. In this example, the 'onAnimationEvent' method is called with the animation event, which includes the phase name ('start' or 'done').

import { trigger, state, style, animate, transition } from '@angular/animations';

@Component({
  selector: 'my-component',
  templateUrl: 'my-component.html',
  animations: [
    trigger('openClose', [
      transition('open => closed', [
        animate('1s', style({ opacity: 0 }))
      ]),
    ]),
  ]
})
export class MyComponent {
  animationStatus = 'ready';

  onAnimationEvent(event: AnimationEvent) {
    this.animationStatus = event.phaseName;
  }
}

Reusable animations

Reusable animations allow you to define an animation once and reuse it in different components or triggers. The example defines a 'fadeInAnimation' and uses it in a component with the 'fadeIn' trigger.

import { animation, useAnimation, transition, trigger } from '@angular/animations';

export const fadeInAnimation = animation([ animate('100ms ease-in', style({ opacity: 1 })) ]);

@Component({
  selector: 'my-component',
  templateUrl: 'my-component.html',
  animations: [
    trigger('fadeIn', [
      transition(':enter', useAnimation(fadeInAnimation))
    ])
  ]
})
export class MyComponent {}

Other packages similar to @angular/animations

react-spring

React-spring is a spring-physics based animation library for React applications. It provides a similar declarative API for defining animations but is tailored for React instead of Angular. It offers a different set of primitives and hooks for creating animations in a React environment.

animejs

Anime.js is a lightweight JavaScript animation library that works with any web framework, including Angular. It provides a more imperative approach to animations and includes a wide range of features for animating CSS properties, SVG, DOM attributes, and JavaScript Objects. It is not as tightly integrated with Angular as @angular/animations.

GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform)

GSAP is a robust, professional-grade animation library for the web. It is highly performant and feature-rich, offering advanced sequencing, staggering, and easing options. While it can be used with Angular, it does not provide the same level of framework integration and may require more manual setup compared to @angular/animations.