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Project moved to @ng-idle/core

ng2-idle

Introduction

A module for responding to idle users in Angular2 applications. This is a rewrite of the ng-idle module; however if you are using Angular 1, you must use that module.

License

Authored by Mike Grabski @HackedByChinese [e-mail]

Licensed under MIT

Design Considerations

The primary application of this module is to detect when users are idle. It can also be used to warn users of an impending timeout, and then time them out. The core of this module is the Idle service which does its best - based on your configuration - to detect when a user is active or idle and pass that information on to your application so it can respond appropriately.

Extensible Keepalive Integration

In a common use case where it is used for session management, you may need to signal to the server periodically that the user is still logged in and active. If you need that functionality, ng2-idle can optionally integrate with ng2-idle-keepalive. ng2-idle will instruct ng2-idle-keepalive to ping while the user is active, and stop once they go idle or time out. When the user resumes activity or the idle state is reset, it will ping immediately and then resume pinging. Please note that keepalive integration is optional, and you must install and configure ng2-idle-keepalive separately to get this functionality. You can implement your own by extending KeepaliveSvc and configuring it as a provider in your application for the KeepaliveSvc class.

Extensible Interrupts

An interrupt is any source of input (typically from the user, but could be things like other tabs or an event) that can be used to signal to Idle that the idle watch should be interrupted or reset. Unlike ng-idle, these sources are not hardcoded; you can extend InterruptSource or any of the built-in sources to suit your purposes. This feature is also useful to handle input noise that may plague your particular use case. It can also be used to target specific elements on a page rather than the whole document or window. The following sources come built into this package:

• InterruptSource (abstract): A base type you can implement to make your own source.
• EventTargetInterruptSource: Any object that implements EventTarget, such as an HTMLElement or Window. Takes in the object that is the source and a space delimited string containing the events that cause an interrupt.
• DocumentInterruptSource: Looks for events (in a space delimited string) that bubble up to the document.documentElement (html node).
• WindowInterruptSource: Looks for events (in a space delimited string) that bubble up to the Window.

NOTE: You must configure source(s) yourself when you initialize the application. By default, no interrupts are configured. You can use a configuration analogous to the ng-idle default by importing DEFAULT_INTERRUPTSOURCES and passing that reference to Idle.setInterrupts(DEFAULT_INTERRUPTSOURCES);.

Extensible Expiry

Another feature ported from ng-idle is the ability to store an expiry value in some store where multiple tabs or windows running the same application can write to. Commonly, this store is the localStorage, but could be cookies or whatever you want. The purpose of this expiry and the expiry store is twofold: First, to prevent a window from not timing out if it sleeps or pauses longer than the configured timeout period. Second, it can be used so that activity in one tab or window prevents other tabs or windows in the same application from timing out.

By default, a SimpleExpiry type is provided, which will just keep track of the expiry in memory. It will fulfill the first purpose mentioned above, but it will not fulfill the second. In other words, SimpleExpiry does not coordinate last activity between tabs or windows; you'll need to use or create an implementation that supports that. An official implementation of that using localStorage is forthcoming. You can create your own by extending IdleExpiry or SimpleExpiry and configuring it as a provider for the IdleExpiry class.

NOTE An IdleExpiry implementation must be configured. If you don't care about or need this functionality, just use the default SimpleExpiry (this is included in IDLE_PROVIDERS).

Multiple Idle Instance Support

The dependency injector in Angular 2 supports a hierarchical injection strategy. This allows you to create an instance of Idle at whatever scope you need, and there can be more than one instance. This allows you two have two separate watches, for example, on two different elements on the page.

Example Use Case

For example, consider an email application. For increased security, the application may wish to determine when the user is inactive and log them out, giving them a chance to extend their session if they are still at the computer and just got distracted. Additionally, for even better security the server may issue the user's session a security token that expires after 5 minutes of inactivity. The user may take much more time than that to type out their email and send it. It would be frustrating to find you are logged out when you were actively using the software!

ng2-idle can detect that the user is clicking, typing, touching, scrolling, etc. and know that the user is still active. It can work with ng2-idle-keepalive to ping the server every few minutes to keep them logged in. In this case, as long as the user is doing something, they stay logged in. If they step away from the computer, we can present a warning dialog, and then after a countdown, log them out.

Getting Started

Please visit ng2-idle-example for source and instructions on how to get started.

Developing

Note This project was developed using NodeJS 5.5 and NPM 3.3.12. You may experience problems using older versions. Try NVM or similar to manage different versions of Node concurrently.

This repository uses TypeScript (with Typings as the definition manager), Gulp, tslint, eslint (for JS files used in Gulp tasks), Karma, and Jasmine.

To run Gulp tasks, you'll need to install the gulp-cli.

 npm install -g gulp-cli

Once you have cloned the repository, install all packages.

 npm install

You can now build and run tests.

 gulp test

If you want to continuously build and test, first execute this task in a separate window:

 gulp build:dev:watch

Then run this task:

 gulp test:watch

If you wish to prepare a branch for a pull request, run this command and fix any errors:

 gulp build

You can use clang-format to automatically correct most style errors and then commit the results:

 gulp clang:format

Contributing

See the contributing guide.