August 6, 2014
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Popover Support Lands in Ionic

Adam Bradley

A commonly requested feature from the community has been the Popover, which we’re happy to now have included within Ionic v1.0.0-beta.11.

A popover is a view that floats above an app’s content, except it stays attached to the element that opens up the popover. The popover content is usually emitted from a button, an action, a pointer, or another control, which is similar to how Ionic’s modals or actionsheets work. It’s a common interaction seen on iPad apps and other aliases, including drop downs, menus, chips, etc.

Popovers provide an easy way to present or gather information from the user and are commonly used to:

  • Show more info about the current view
  • Select a commonly used tool or configuration within a list
  • Present a list of actions to perform inside one of your views

Like with all of Ionic’s other components, its goal is to give the developer full control of creating a popover, and continue to take advantage of all the niceties of AngularJS, such as template files, controllers, scoped variables, etc.

See the Pen by Ionic (@ionic) on CodePen.

The popover itself is another view, not simply a preformatted list. This means anything you can do within a standard view, you can do within a popover. Scrollable areas, header bars, header buttons, content areas, form inputs, etc., can all be used no differently that a standard view. Check out the popover documentation for more.

By default, Ionic’s popover comes in three styles: Base, iOS and Android. The base style, as you guessed it, is the base style that each platform overrides. Each of the platforms have subtle differences, but those differences ensure a consistent interface for the platform from which it’s being run. (Setting the correct platform style is all a part of Ionic’s initializing and isn’t something that needs to be manually set.)

Please give it a shot, and as always, please let us know what we can do to improve Ionic to help make your development easier. Thanks!


Adam Bradley