Upgrade used JSS Angular Version to 16

[mohaalshehri]

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

soon used version 14 will not get any more security updates, because the security support is end of life is at (2023-11-18).
Also, frameworks that may be dependent on the angular version, will no longer get updates for older versions.
It's also not possible to use newer framework features with the old version.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like to request an update of the used angular version to the newest version 16.x.

Is there a way to achieve this functionality with exisiting tools?

no alternative

Additional information

Is there a roadmap for that?

[art-alexeyenko]

Angular 14 is still marked as LTS, but we do need to upgrade it.
v15 update is in our pipeline for this year (certainly before the end of LTS for v14), and perhaps we'll jump right to v16.

[art-alexeyenko]

@informatious The release of v15 support has just been rolled out, and we'd like to also roll out the support for v16 by the end of the year (hopefully earlier, but I'm just being careful with timelines).
The reason we went for v15 immediately is to address the expedited nodejs 16 EOL and have all our samples be compatible with node 18. Specifically because v15 changes are more limited, we used it as a sort of stepping maintenance stone to be set up for v16 update later.

[tomvoigt]

@art-alexeyenko Great! Looking forward to that, much appreciated.

[kpicavet]

@art-alexeyenko We did the upgrade to angular 15, but when trying to build the application we get an error on the build:server script saying it doesn't know the argument 'bundle-dependencies' .

I tried to do the same in the sample app (seems like it's still on 14, but upgraded it as well) & got the same result:

ng run sitecore-jss-app:server:production --output-path=$npm_package_config_buildArtifactsPath/server --output-hashing=none --bundle-dependencies true

=> Error: Unknown argument: bundle-dependencies

If I remove the argument & deploy it, our app is broken. Any idea how to solve this?

[AVierwind]

Is the end of the year still the planning for 16?

[art-alexeyenko]

@AVierwind the work on the update is planned to be done within the next two weeks - and it should go into 21.6 release in January.
v21.6 will have some extra XMCloud-centric things that we want to ensure are working correctly, in addition to the Angular update. I'm sorry about the delay on this, but I ask you to please bear a little longer. It would help us ensure a more smooth release overall.

[kpicavet]

Angular 16 introduces a lot of nice new features like signals and improvements for server side rendering.
Especially the server side rendering improvements would give the performance of an angular app a huge boost which we would need to make our case to start building our app with angular + jss.

[AVierwind]

The difference between 15 and 16 in functionality is quite big. It is not be possible to have a angular 16 project using this package until this package is also on v16. This is currently stalling our LCM.

Also i am curious what the strategy is for this type of life cycle management on the angular package, so we can plan our lcm projects accordingly

[illiakovalenko]

Hey guys
Update regarding this discussion: we upgraded our sdk and template to Angular 16.
At this moment it's available within the canary version

[spike1292]

Created a pr to fix some regression issues we found during upgrading: #1706