Expected behavior of copying assets with localized project

[shamoon]

Hi there, thank you for this project, I think it's great. I recently went ahead and migrated a project I work on to using this (btw, ng2-pdf-viewer has seen such limited updates recently, you may want to remove it from your docs...) and had a pretty easy time doing that, again, the project works great.

However, when it came time to test this out my builds were taking way longer and ballooned in size from ~100mb to 800mb. After investigating a bit I've discovered that the assets dir and all of its contents are being copied dozens of times into the respective localized folders my project builds, in other words I end up with:

• frontend/af-ZA/assets/[all assets]
• frontend/ar-AR/assets/[all assets]
• etc.

I cant say that I have a very deep understanding of the angular build config, so my question is whether this a) is expected, and b) can be avoided? I took a look at #852 and will implement that but should I still be getting these files repeated under each locale?

Thanks again for any guidance

[stephanrauh]

That's weird. The entire showcase - containing both the assets and the bleeding-edge branch without any optimization - weighs in at "merely" 50 mb. I also have a hard time understanding how Angular can build a recursive folder structure. Maybe you've got a duplicate entry in the angular.json?

Create a new project using ng new and ng add ngx-extended-pdf-viewer, as described here: https://pdfviewer.net/extended-pdf-viewer/getting-started. Getting it up and running should be a matter of less than five minutes. After confirming your greenfield project works, compare the angular.json of both projects. Usually this helps you to find the issue quickly.

[shamoon]

I do think this is essentially ‘expected’ it’s just kind of a problem given the size of all the files. But I’m not sure there’s any actual solution, it’s just kinda what angular does, duplicating assets per locale

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68470821/how-to-create-a-common-assets-folder-for-multiple-locale-in-angular
angular/angular-cli#18414

[stephanrauh]

It seems you're using a non-standard configuration. By default, every language folder contains the entire application. When I add ngx-extended-pdf-viewer to the demo you can download here https://angular.io/guide/i18n-example, the dist folder looks like so:

[shamoon]

But thats the same thing right? In each of those folders:
dist/browser/en-US/assets/
dist/browser/fr/assets/

you have all of the assets, so the entire /locale/ folder, all of the JS files are duplicated in each location.

Again, Im not suggesting this project is doing anything wrong, and it seems this is just how Angular works but it does make the overall releases very heavy as the assets are duplicated many times.

[stephanrauh]

If your top-level folders af-ZA and ar-AR also contain the main bundle and the index.html, you're right, your screenshots show the same behavior as my screenshots. For some reason, I believed you've got only one index.html and a top-level assets folder that contains many nested assets folder.

BTW, I'm not sure I'd call @angular/localize "the" standard. It's a fascinating approach that has many advantages, but I've never seen it in the wild yet. That doesn't mean much: I've been merely on two or three projects with i18n. That's not enough to call me an expert. Nonetheless, these projects used ngx-translate (http://www.ngx-translate.com/). That's a less ambitious project. It trades performance for flexibility. In particular, it allows you to change the language at runtime. In contrast, @angular/localizerequires reloading the application. Maybe that's an option for you.

[shamoon]

Yea, they each contain the index.html, main.js, etc., its the whole app duplicated 😑

Ha, yea I guess I think of @angular packages as standard, but cool, I havent heard of that other project (it's probably too big of a lift for us at this point). Mostly, I think my project suffers this issue more than most because it has a lot of languages.

Thanks again for your time (and the project!).