What is a factory in Angular

What exactly are factories in Angular(2+)?

Factory is one of the design patterns mentioned by Gang of Four (Basically they wrote a book on the design patterns they discovered).

Design Patterns help programmers solve common development tasks in a specific way.

And in this case, the Factory pattern helps in instantiation and creation of Objects.

It is also known as the Virtual Constructor.

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Think of it, like this:

Say you are making a 2D shooter game, and you have to shoot bullets out of barrels.

Instead of instantiating bullets like new Bullet(), every time trigger is pulled, you can use a factory to create bullets, i.e. WeaponsFactory.createInstance(BulletTypes.AK47_BULLET).

It becomes highly scalable, since all you have to do is change the enum and the factory will make it for you.

You won't have to manually instantiate it.

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That is what angular does, it automatically creates factory of all the components. Which makes its job easier.

Are there scenarios that a developer benefits form knowing how they work?

You don't have to know the inner workings of a Factory to use Angular, but it's useful for creating components dynamically!

e.g. A lot of *ngIf, or *ngSwitchCase can be replaced by a simple dynamic generation of components

Components can be created dynamically like this:

createComponent(type) {
  this.container.clear();
  const factory: ComponentFactory = this.resolver.resolveComponentFactory(AlertComponent);
  this.componentRef: ComponentRef = this.container.createComponent(factory);
}

Reference for understanding the above code: Dynamically Creating Components