How to create a responsive (varying column count) Angular-Material card grid

Question

I'm trying to create a grid of Angular-Material cards that behaves somewhat like a Bootstrap grid. Ideally, cards will be full-width for small screen widths and jump to two columns at larger breakpoints.

Demo with 2 cards

The problem is that A-M creates columns for each card. I haven't figured out how to specify the number of columns for each breakpoint.

Demo with 5 cards

Here's the basis of the markup I'm using, which takes the card layout from rows to columns at the first breakpoint:

<div ng-app layout="column" layout-gt-sm="row" class="layout-sm-column layout-row">
  <div flex class="flex" ng-repeat="i in [1,2,3,4,5] track by $index">
    <md-card>

There's a similar question on SO already, but accepted answer is unsatisfactory as it uses custom CSS and the cards aren't fluid-width. I've found no other similar examples.

I suppose I could loop every two cards with Angular and create stacked sets, but that seems needlessly cumbersome. I have to think that Material provides for a better solution. Also, such solutions would leave whitespace in the page where cards vary in height. Material seems geared toward a Masonry-like flex layout, and I'd like to stick with that.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the material Grid-List, it allows for custom col-spans and animates the changes when the width changes.

I adapted the sample from the site and added md-card in the contents. Make sure to add layout-fill on the md-card. You can easily adapt the sample for your column count.

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/QypjWY

I also adapted your 5 card sample. You need to know the height of the cards in order to use the Grid-List, but you can easily achieve the 100% height on small screens. You can use ratios or fixed CSS heights for the rows and then it is your cards job to display the content in a flexible way.

<md-grid-list ng-app="app" layout-fill flex
    md-cols-sm="1"
    md-cols-md="2"
    md-cols-gt-md="5"
    md-row-height-sm="100%"
    md-row-height="600px"
    md-gutter="8px">
    <md-grid-tile ng-repeat="i in [1,2,3,4,5] track by $index">
        <md-card layout-fill>

http://jsfiddle.net/2afaok1n/34/

Edit:

If you are instead looking for some kind of staggered grid, then you have to add a library: angular-deckgrid, it just provides the grid layout, everything in the content is angular-material. Unlike angular-masonry this library doesn't have any dependencies. If you are not worried about adding jQuery and the like then you can also use angular-masonry.

<div ng-app="app" ng-controller="DeckController" flex layout="column">
   <deckgrid class="deckgrid" flex source="data">
       <md-card>

The important part for the deck layout is the CSS configuration. With this you configure the number of columns and their width. I have used a media query for the angular-material sm breakpoint to switch to single column layout.

.deckgrid::before {
  content: '4 .column.column-1-4';
  font-size: 0;
  visibility: hidden;
}

.deckgrid .column {
  float: left;
}

.deckgrid .column-1-4 {
  width: 25%;
}

.deckgrid .column-1-1 {
  width: 100%;
}

@media screen and (max-width: 960px) {
  .deckgrid::before {
    content: '1 .column.column-1-1';
  }
}

http://jsfiddle.net/2afaok1n/39/

Edit 2:

There is also a masonry version which doesn't require jQuery and a simple directive to use it: angular-masonry-directive. Here is an example, it works similar to the other one.

http://jsfiddle.net/xjnp97ye/1/