I am a relative beginner in Angular, and I am struggling to understand some source I am reading from the ng-bootstrap project. The source code can be found here.
I
My personal opinion is that they were using this for RxJS prior 5.5 which introduced lettable operators. The same style is used internally by Angular. For example: https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/packages/router/src/router_preloader.ts#L91.
The reason for this is that by default they would have to patch the Observable class with rxjs/add/operators/XXX
. The disadvantage of this is that some 3rd party library is modifying a global object that might unexpectedly cause problems somewhere else in your app. See https://github.com/ReactiveX/rxjs/blob/master/doc/lettable-operators.md#why.
You can see at the beginning of the file that they import each operator separately https://github.com/ng-bootstrap/ng-bootstrap/blob/master/src/typeahead/typeahead.ts#L22-L25.
So by using .call()
they can use any operator and still avoid patching the Observable
class.