OK, so first of all the http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/ has a <modal>
directive and the $dialog
service and both of those can be used to open modal windows.
The difference is that with the <modal>
directive content of a modal is embedded in a hosting template (one that triggers modal window opening). The $dialog
service is far more flexible and allow you to load modal's content from a separate file as well as trigger modal windows from any place in AngularJS code (this being a controller, a service or another directive).
Not sure what you mean exactly by "using JavaScript code" but assuming that you mean any place in AngularJS code the $dialog
service is probably a way to go.
It is very easy to use and in its simplest form you could just write:
$dialog.dialog({}).open('modalContent.html');
To illustrate that it can be really triggered by any JavaScript code here is a version that triggers modal with a timer, 3 seconds after a controller was instantiated:
function DialogDemoCtrl($scope, $timeout, $dialog){
$timeout(function(){
$dialog.dialog({}).open('modalContent.html');
}, 3000);
}
This can be seen in action in this plunk: http://plnkr.co/edit/u9HHaRlHnko492WDtmRU?p=preview
Finally, here is the full reference documentation to the $dialog
service described here:
https://github.com/angular-ui/bootstrap/blob/master/src/dialog/README.md