Working with WinWheel.js and GreenSock's GSAP in Angular

I was assigned a task to make a spinwheel for one of the gamification feature in an webapp which was build with Angular 4.

If you've been working with Angular in Typescript for a while, especially those require 3rd party libraries integrations, you may already experienced the pain integrating stuff which was build to fully compatible with Typescript.

This post is not about solving library integration to your typescript codebase, but how do you get Winwheel.js work in your Angular code which has cost me few amount of trial and error effort, hope my sample code saves some of your development time if you are facing the same issue as I gone through.




As you can see from the typescript code above, the integration of winwheel.js and tweenlite (GSAP) just requires:

  
    import * as Winwheel from 'Winwheel';
    import * as tweenlite from 'tweenlite';
  

Next step is to create a new instance of Winwheel object with:

    this.wheel = new Winwheel.Winwheel(/* your custom config goes here */);

In the rest of your code, you can then start using Winwheel.js API through this.wheel declared above, as the example above does not require data manipulation after the spinning is complete.

GSAP integration

Working with GSAP isn't very hard, but that's one thing I've overlooked at very first time and did aware of the existence of changing target scope to a correct one.

Most of my time spent on fixing the this scope, and found out we have an option to change the this scope with onUpdateScope and this solve most of my headache integrating tweenlite to my winwheel.js.

* In the sample code above is using tweenlite, you can use tweenmax as long as you are pointing to the correct scope.

Improvement/Enhancement

If the spin's end result is required for further calculation, you'll need the service of NgZone to tell Angular to keep an eye on the changes of state.

To do so, you can add following enhancement to the onComplete function:

  
    let onComplete = () => {
      console.log('Done spinning!');
      ngZone.run(() => {
        // do something with the data obtained from the spinwheel
        let prize = this.wheel.getIndicatedSegment();
        console.log(prize);
      });
    };
  

Docs: getIndicatedSegment