Ionic/Cordova: How to integrate Cordova Plugins in

Question

I have an Ionic project where I need the Cordova Camera plugin (which I now installed successfully). But in my project the Camera API is still not available, i.e. I get error thrown:

ReferenceError: Camera is not defined
at Scope.$scope.takePic 

How do I active the plugin API(s) to be used in an Ionic project? Documentation about this seems to be rather nonexistant or very well hidden.

Answer 1

Follow these steps:

1. Include ngCordova before cordova.js

You can found the same description in the docs.

<script src="lib/ngCordova/dist/ng-cordova.js"></script>
<script src="cordova.js"></script>

2. Add your plugin on the command line

You can find this step in the docs in the section of your specific plugin.

ionic plugin add org.apache.cordova.camera

3. Remember that cordova is not available while working in the browser

So when using the $cordovaCamera.getPicture the library is calling internally navigator.camera.getPicture which is not available when developing in the desktop browser. Further reading

The ngCordova / Ionic team is currently working on mocks you can use to avoid problems like that.

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You can download ngCordova here: http://ngcordova.com/docs/install/

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Update: There is Ionic Native now, it's like ngCordova but for ES6 and TypeScript.

Answer 2

You need to inject Camera into the controller, like so:

.controller('MyCtrl', function($scope, Camera) {

Note that there is not a dollar sign before Camera. This really should be documented more explicitly.

Also, you will need to add a factory to your services.js:

.factory('Camera', ['$q', function($q) {

  return {
    getPicture: function(options) {
      var q = $q.defer();

      navigator.camera.getPicture(function(result) {
        // Do any magic you need
        q.resolve(result);
      }, function(err) {
        q.reject(err);
      }, options);

      return q.promise;
    }
  }
}])

Answer 3

I'm trying to figure out how to use standard Cordova plugins with Ionic myself, but the ionic team just recently built ngCordova--an angular wrapper for common cordova APIs, which includes the Camera api you want to use. Would suggest using that: see their docs for more info.

Answer 4

Open a terminal in your app's root directory and add the plugin via

cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.camera

Edit:
the new command is:

cordova plugin rm cordova-plugin-camera //remove
cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-camera //add

Answer 5

You can install the plugin by run :

$ cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.camera

Now that you have the plugin installed, you can use the camera API from your Javascript:

function takePicture() {
  navigator.camera.getPicture(function(imageURI) {

    // imageURI is the URL of the image that we can use for
    // an <img> element or backgroundImage.

  }, function(err) {

    // Ruh-roh, something bad happened

  }, cameraOptions);
}

This will prompt the user to take a photo, and will return the local URL of the image that you can then use inside of an tag or use for a CSS background image.

You can use the code below for a simple wrapper over the Camera plugin that makes it easy to asynchronously grab photos:

module.factory('Camera', ['$q', function($q) {

  return {
    getPicture: function(options) {
      var q = $q.defer();

      navigator.camera.getPicture(function(result) {
        // Do any magic you need
        q.resolve(result);
      }, function(err) {
        q.reject(err);
      }, options);

      return q.promise;
    }   } }]);

This factory can be used in your controllers like this:

.controller('MyCtrl', function($scope, Camera) {

  $scope.getPhoto = function() {
    Camera.getPicture().then(function(imageURI) {
      console.log(imageURI);
    }, function(err) {
      console.err(err);
    });
  };

Which will open the Camera when getPhoto() is called (from a button click, for example).

Depending on how you request the data back from the Camera and use it in your Angular markup, you may have to whitelist image URLs so Angular allows file:// URLs (for example, if you are using ng-src for an tag):

module.config(function($compileProvider){
  $compileProvider.imgSrcSanitizationWhitelist(/^\s*(https?|ftp|mailto|file|tel):/);
})

Answer 6

Go to the project directory.

Run this command:

$ ionic integrations enable cordova --quiet

(Hope this helps others.)