How to Easily Add a Progress Bar to Your Angular App

Angular Material provides a rich set of pre-built UI components to integrate into Angular applications. One of these components is the ‘Progress Bar’. In this post, we will be diving into how to use the <mat-progress-bar> component, specifically focusing on its indeterminate mode.

1. Setting Up Your Angular Environment

Before we get started, you must have an Angular environment set up. If you haven’t done so already, you can follow the official Angular Setup Guide to create a new project.

2. Installing Angular Material

After setting up your Angular environment, you need to install Angular Material. You can do this by running the following command in your terminal:

ng add @angular/material

This will install Angular Material and configure your application to use it.

3. Importing the MatProgressBarModule

You need to import the MatProgressBarModule in your application module to use the <mat-progress-bar> component:

import { MatProgressBarModule } from '@angular/material/progress-bar';

@NgModule({
  ...
  imports: [
    MatProgressBarModule,
    ...
  ],
})
export class AppModule { }

4. Using the <mat-progress-bar> Component

The <mat-progress-bar> component can be used in your component's template. Here's an example:

<mat-progress-bar mode="indeterminate"></mat-progress-bar>

In this example, we’re using the mode attribute with a value of "indeterminate". This represents a loading process of an unknown duration.

5. Styling Your Progress Bar

You can style your progress bar by using CSS classes or inline styles. Here’s an example where we’re setting the color of the progress bar to ‘accent’ and styling it with a CSS class:

<mat-progress-bar mode="indeterminate" color="accent" class="my-progress-bar"></mat-progress-bar>

And here’s how you might define that class in your CSS:

.my-progress-bar {
  width: 100%;
  height: 20px;
}

Conclusion

And there you have it! You’ve just learned how to use the <mat-progress-bar> component in Angular Material. The Progress Bar component can be extremely helpful in communicating loading states to your users, making for a much smoother user experience. Happy coding!

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