Show pop-ups the most elegant way

• Create a 'popup' directive and apply it to the container of the popup content
• In the directive, wrap the content in a absolute position div along with the mask div below it.
• It is OK to move the 2 divs in the DOM tree as needed from within the directive. Any UI code is OK in the directives, including the code to position the popup in center of screen.
• Create and bind a boolean flag to controller. This flag will control visibility.
• Create scope variables that bond to OK / Cancel functions etc.

Editing to add a high level example (non functional)

<div id='popup1-content' popup='showPopup1'>
  ....
  ....
</div>


<div id='popup2-content' popup='showPopup2'>
  ....
  ....
</div>



.directive('popup', function() {
  var p = {
      link : function(scope, iElement, iAttrs){
           //code to wrap the div (iElement) with a abs pos div (parentDiv)
          // code to add a mask layer div behind 
          // if the parent is already there, then skip adding it again.
         //use jquery ui to make it dragable etc.
          scope.watch(showPopup, function(newVal, oldVal){
               if(newVal === true){
                   $(parentDiv).show();
                 } 
              else{
                 $(parentDiv).hide();
                }
          });
      }


   }
  return p;
});

It's funny because I'm learning Angular myself and was watching some video's from their channel on Youtube. The speaker mentions your exact problem in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhfUv0spHCY#t=1681 around the 28:30 minute mark.

It comes down to placing that particular piece of code in a service rather then a controller.

My guess would be to inject new popup elements into the DOM and handle them separate instead of showing and hiding the same element. This way you can have multiple popups.

The whole video is very interesting to watch as well :-)

Based on my experience with AngularJS modals so far I believe that the most elegant approach is a dedicated service to which we can provide a partial (HTML) template to be displayed in a modal.

When we think about it modals are kind of AngularJS routes but just displayed in modal popup.

The AngularUI bootstrap project (http://angular-ui.github.com/bootstrap/) has an excellent $modal service (used to be called $dialog prior to version 0.6.0) that is an implementation of a service to display partial's content as a modal popup.

See http://adamalbrecht.com/2013/12/12/creating-a-simple-modal-dialog-directive-in-angular-js/ for a simple way of doing modal dialog with Angular and without needing bootstrap

Edit: I've since been using ng-dialog from http://likeastore.github.io/ngDialog which is flexible and doesn't have any dependencies.