Create a Shared Component in Ionic 3

We use Ionic 3 to develop mobile applications. We of course want to re-use the code as much as possible. Component provides us a way to create our building block and re-use them in the application. At the same time, Ionic 3 also supports lazy loading. Each lazy-loaded page itself is in a module. How do we share the component between these modules? The first option is to declare the component in the app module (a.k.a app.module.ts). But this will beat the purpose of lazy loading. The component will be loaded when the app starts. We want to load it only when it's used. We can wrap the component into a module and import it in the places where it is used. Let's see how to do it.

Create a Project

Let's create a project.

$ npm install -g ionic cordova
$ ionic start sharedComponentDemo

This will take a while to download the necessary node packages. After that, we can go ahead to add pages and components. We'll use hero form in the demo. We'll have two pages that use the same form. The first page is to add a hero and the second page is to edit the hero. It makes sense to share the same form component.

Add Pages

We'll use the Ionic command to add pages. We'll make them lazy loading later.
First, let's create the page to add a hero.

$ ionic g page hero.add

That will create three files:

$ ls src/pages/hero-add/
hero-add.html  hero-add.scss  hero-add.ts

Then let's create a page to edit a hero

$ ionic g page hero.edit

Wire Pages to App

If you run ionic serve now, you won't see the page. That's because the new pages we just added aren't wired to the app. And the pages created from the command aren't lazy loadable either. We're going to make them lazy loadable and add them to the application. We'll only use HeroAddPage as an example. We can apply the same change to HeroEditPage.
First, we need to import IonicPage from ionic-angular in hero-add.ts, and add the decorator @IonicPage to the class HeroAddPage (above @Component).
Then, we'll create a module.

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { IonicPageModule } from 'ionic-angular';
import { HeroAddPage } from './hero-add';

@NgModule({
  entryComponents: [
    HeroAddPage,
  ],
  exports: [
    HeroAddPage,
  ],
  declarations: [
    HeroAddPage,
  ],
  imports: [
    IonicPageModule.forChild(HeroAddPage),
  ],
  providers: [
  ],
})
export class HeroAddModule {}

We have the module for the page now. We can use it in the application. The Ionic command creates the app using the tab template. Let's change tabs.ts. Replace tab1Root with "HeroAddPage" and tab2Root with "HeroEditPage" and remove other tabs. Now we show the pages in the app. We don't need to import the modules or components. We just use the pages in the form of string. Ionic will load them.

A Shared Component

The shared component is a form for adding or editing a hero. Let's still use the command to create it.

$ ionic g component hero.form

Similar to the pages, we create the component and the module. I'll omit the component since it's similar to page. It just doesn't use @IonicPage. I'll focus on the module. We have to export the component.

import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { FormsModule }   from '@angular/forms';
import { IonicModule } from 'ionic-angular';
import { HeroFormComponent } from './hero-form';

@NgModule({
  entryComponents: [
  ],
  exports: [
    HeroFormComponent,
  ],
  declarations: [
    HeroFormComponent,
  ],
  imports: [
    FormsModule,
    IonicModule,
  ],
  providers: [
  ],
})
export class HeroFormModule {}

That's it. We just create a reusable component that can be used in different modules. There is one more step though. We need to import it in the modules where we use it. For example, in hero-add.module.ts, we add HeroFormModule into imports.

Here are the steps to create and use a shared component:
1. Add the component to a shared module and export the component in the module.
2. Import the shared module in the modules where we'll use the component.
You can check out the complete demo app at https://github.com/kceiw/sharedComponentDemo.git.
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