so if found this very interesting bug in angular.js. if you have a custom directive inside a ng-repeat that is actively changing the variables in the directive don't update. meaning if i have 3 elements in my array for ng-repeat it initializes just fine but if i delete element 1 from the array any variables that element 1 had passed to its child directive somehow end up in element 2's child directive here is my example code.
<div ng-app='testing'>
<div ng-controller='testing as test'>
<div ng-repeat='item in test.example track by $index'>
{{item.title}}
<child scope='item.data'></child>
<button ng-click="test.delete($index)">
Delete
</button>
</div>
</div>
</div>
then in my js file
console.log('hello world');
var app=angular.module('testing',['testingChild']);
app.controller('testing',[function(){
this.example=[{
title:"this is the first title",
data:"this is the first index"
},{
title:"this is the second title",
data:"this is the second index"
},{
title:"this is the third title",
data:"this is the third index"
}];
this.delete=function(index){
this.example.splice(index,1);
};
}]);
var child=angular.module('testingChild',[]);
child.directive('child',[function(){
return{
restrict:"E",
scope:{
parent:"=scope"
},
template:"<div>{{child.parent}}</div>",
controller:['$scope',function($scope){
this.parent=$scope.parent;
}],
controllerAs:"child"
};
}]);
and i have a functioning jsfiddle here. all you have to do to see it work is delete one of the first elements. does anyone know what causes this and how to fix it?
Side note:
I thought it might be useful also to mention that when using this in a slighty different situation with editable elements in the child (like a text box) the data binding worked from the child to the parent. so assigning a variable attached to the controller to the scoped variable from the parent worked in that direction. this seems to be the only situation i have come across where it would be from the parent to the child and that is what is not working.
Change:
template:"<div>{{child.parent}}</div>",
controller:['$scope',function($scope){ this.parent=$scope.parent; }]
To:
template:"<div>{{parent}}</div>"
controller:function(){ }
since you are using controllerAs syntax, you dont need the $scope injection.
For the binding work as expected, you dont use child.parent, only parent (or whatever you inject in the this context on your controller
I found a property in the $compile service that fixes this problem. adding the attribute bindToController:true to the directive takes all of the variables defined in your scope attribute and attaches them to the controller rather then the scope itself meaning the 2 way data binding is to the variable on the controller rather then the variable on the scope. so the end result has these changes
in your directive definition
scope:{
parent:"=scope"
},
bindToController:true,
and in the controller remove the this.parent=$scope.parent
here is an updated jsfiddle
Related
Here is my plnkr: http://plnkr.co/edit/n8cRXwIpHJw3jUpL8PX5?p=preview You have to click on a li element and the form will appear. Enter a random string and hit 'add notice'. Instead of the textarea text you will get undefined.
Markup:
<ul>
<li ng-repeat="ticket in tickets" ng-click="select(ticket)">
{{ ticket.text }}
</li>
</ul>
<div ui-if="selectedTicket != null">
<form ng-submit="createNotice(selectedTicket)">
<textarea ng-model="noticeText"></textarea>
<button type="submit">add notice</button>
</form>
</div>
JS part:
$scope.createNotice = function(ticket){
alert($scope.noticeText);
}
returns 'undefined'. I noticed that this does not work when using ui-if of angular-ui. Any ideas why this does not work? How to fix it?
Your problem lies in the ui-if part. Angular-ui creates a new scope for anything within that directive so in order to access the parent scope, you must do something like this:
<textarea ng-model="$parent.noticeText"></textarea>
Instead of
<textarea ng-model="noticeText"></textarea>
This issue happened to me while not using the ng-if directive on elements surrounding the textarea element. While the solution of Mathew is correct, the reason seems to be another. Searching for that issue points to this post, so I decided to share this.
If you look at the AngularJS documentation here https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/directive/textarea , you can see that Angular adds its own directive called <textarea> that "overrides" the default HTML textarea element. This is the new scope that causes the whole mess.
If you have a variable like
$scope.myText = 'Dummy text';
in your controller and bind that to the textarea element like this
<textarea ng-model="myText"></textarea>
AngularJS will look for that variable in the scope of the directive. It is not there and thus he walks down to $parent. The variable is present there and the text is inserted into the textarea. When changing the text in the textarea, Angular does NOT change the parent's variable. Instead it creates a new variable in the directive's scope and thus the original variable is not updated. If you bind the textarea to the parent's variable, as suggested by Mathew, Angular will always bind to the correct variable and the issue is gone.
<textarea ng-model="$parent.myText"></textarea>
Hope this will clear things up for other people coming to this question and and think "WTF, I am not using ng-if or any other directive in my case!" like I did when I first landed here ;)
Update: Use controller-as syntax
Wanted to add this long before but didn't find time to do it. This is the modern style of building controllers and should be used instead of the $parent stuff above. Read on to find out how and why.
Since AngularJS 1.2 there is the ability to reference the controller object directly instead of using the $scope object. This may be achieved by using this syntax in HTML markup:
<div ng-controller="MyController as myc"> [...] </div>
Popular routing modules (i.e. UI Router) provide similar properties for their states. For UI Router you use the following in your state definition:
[...]
controller: "MyController",
controllerAs: "myc",
[...]
This helps us to circumvent the problem with nested or incorrectly addressed scopes. The above example would be constructed this way. First the JavaScript part. Straight forward, you simple do not use the $scope reference to set your text, just use this to attach the property directly to the controller object.
angular.module('myApp').controller('MyController', function () {
this.myText = 'Dummy text';
});
The markup for the textarea with controller-as syntax would look like this:
<textarea ng-model="myc.myText"></textarea>
This is the most efficient way to do things like this today, because it solves the problem with nested scopes making us count how many layers deep we are at a certain point. Using multiple nested directives inside elements with an ng-controller directive could have lead to something like this when using the old way of referencing scopes. And no one really wants to do that all day!
<textarea ng-model="$parent.$parent.$parent.$parent.myText"></textarea>
Bind the textarea to a scope variable's property rather than directly to a scope variable:
controller:
$scope.notice = {text: ""}
template:
<textarea ng-model="notice.text"></textarea>
It is, indeed, ui-if that creates the problem. Angular if directives destroy and recreate portions of the dom tree based on the expression. This is was creates the new scope and not the textarea directive as marandus suggested.
Here's a post on the differences between ngIf and ngShow that describes this well—what is the difference between ng-if and ng-show/ng-hide.
So I am trying to bind inside a directive (to access outside) to a model inside of an ng-repeat. So in the outer controller I have a variable I would like to bind in like
//in the directive scope
filterArray: '='
Inside the directive that would be bound inside the directive to a model in an ng-repeat like so -
//inside the directive
<li ng-repeat="value in filter.values">
<input type="checkbox" ng-model="filterObject[filter.name][value]" ng-change="filterChange()">{{value}}
</li>
This worked fine until I changed the directive to have an isolate scope, now it is saying cannot set property of undefined. Is there any way to get this working as intended? The idea is the variable would build out when the user clicks the inputs so the outer controller would be able to see the built object.
Apologies if this is a bit confusing - I have made a fiddle to clarify : https://jsfiddle.net/vt1uasw7/42/ .
I want the outer controller to have access to the object built by binding the model - again this was working before I added the isolate scope. Thanks!
Edit: maybe the trick in this case is not to use the isolate scope? This one has me stumped, I've tried every combination of scope attributes :(.
If you can't pre-initialize your outter filterObject you can let the directive controller handle that for you:
$scope.filterArray[$scope.filter.name] = {};
And check your parameters as Claies stated, inside your directive you need to use filterArray and also the attribute name in the outter ng-repeat needs to be "filter-array and not "filterArray".
<div ng-repeat="filter in searchResults.filters" class="my-directive" filter="filter" filter-change="filterChange" filter-array="filterObject"> </div>
See this https://jsfiddle.net/vt1uasw7/164/
I recently spent over 4 hours before figuring out why my ng-model directive used in combination with ng-options was not correctly binding to the property within my controller. The <select> element was being properly initialized - receiving a value from the controller (parent) scope. But the child scope was not correctly updating the parent scope. After checking out the following questions and plunkers, I was able to develop a "work around" for this issue:
Helpful stackoverflow question 1
Helpful stackoverflow question 2
Basic Plunker
I found that the property I was binding to in my <select> element was binding to a property of the same name within a child scope of the controller - therefore not the value was not reflected as expected in the controller's scope. After changing
<select ng-options="asset as asset.Name for asset in allAssets" ng-model="selectedAsset" ng-change="lookupAssetPermissions()"></select>
to
<select ng-options="asset as asset.Name for asset in allAssets" ng-model="$parent.selectedAsset" ng-change="lookupAssetPermissions()"></select>
The value in selectedAsset was correctly binding to the property in the controller's scope (as seen in the ng-change event handler). The entire context of my element is the following:
<!---outer div has controller level scope----->
<div>
<!---inner div creates child scope with ng-if----->
<div ng-if="true condition here">
<!---select statement from above----->
<select ng-model="$parent.selectedAsset">...</select>
</div>
</div>
Do I have any other options in this scenario other than purposefully binding to the parent scope? If I had multiple child scopes (nested ng-if statements), would I need to alter the ng-model to bind to $parent.$parent.$parent....selectedAsset in order to update the value in my controllers scope? Are there any "best practices" on this topic?
Put all variables inside some object i.e.:
$scope.Model = {
selectedAsset : 'mySelectedAsset1',
selectedAsset2 : 'mySelectedAsset2',
selectedAsset3 : 'mySelectedAsset3'
}
Then you can:
<div ng-repeat> //new scope
<div ng-repeat> // new scope
<input ng-model="Model.selectedAsset">
This also lows your 'dependency' on $scope, defining such Model object will show everyone who is reading your code what model u have.
I'm trying to use directive on ng-repeat items each with an isolate scope but it isn't working. I'm looping through each item and coloring it red with the inboxuser-select directive. However, when I put the directive on, it doesn't show any of my scope values. What is the issue here? Thanks
html file
<li class="inbox-chatter" data-ng-
repeat="inboxuser in inboxusers">
<p inboxuser-select selected={{inboxuser}}">{{inboxuser}}</p>
</li>
directive.js
.directive('inboxuserSelect', function() {
return {
restrict: 'A',
scope: {
selected: "#"
},
link: function(scope, element, attrs) {
scope.selected.css('color','red');
}
}
});
The problem is that once you set an isolate scope on the directive then the whole DOM element has that isolate scope. So the inboxuser from your ng-repeat is no longer in scope when data binding occurs (it's on the parent scope).
One option is to set scope to true instead of using an isolate scope so you'll inherit everything from the parent scope.
Or you can stick with an isolate scope, but pass inboxuser in to the directive and display it using a template. Since you're already passing inboxuser in to the directive's scope through selected it'd be easy to just add this to your directive:
template: '{{selected}}',
Also, by the way, you're missing a quote on your <p>. So this might work better for you (note I also removed {{inboxuser}} from within the <p> assuming you'll be using the template to display that instead):
<p inboxuser-select selected="{{inboxuser}}"></p>
To be honest, I don't understand what you really need to do but I have a feeling that this design will not get you there.
However, I fixed your example just for the purposes of explaining how things work.
You can see it live here.
So... when you write:
scope: {
selected: "#"
}
you are actually saying that my isolated scope will hold a single property named selected which will be of type string and will contain whatever {{inboxuser}} evaluates to. And not only this, whenever inboxuser changes in the outter scope, selected will also change in the inner, isolated scope. This is how '#' binding works.
Whatever you put nested in <p inboxuser-select selected="{{inboxuser}}"></p>, is binded to that isolated scope, which does not have an inboxuser property. So, it has to change to:
<p inboxuser-select selected="{{inboxuser}}">{{selected}}</p>
Finally, scope.selected.css('color','red'); should be changed to:
element.css('color','red');
The element argument in link function is the DOM element where the directive instance is applied. scope.selected is just a string.
I suggest you rething your overall design. If you need help, feel free to ask.
If it helps you, you can use AngScope, a tiny firebug extention i've written. It's just a quick way to inspect $scope instances associated to DOM elements inside firebug's DOM inspector.
I have an element that has both a controller and a directive with an isolate scope applied to it:
scope: {
dirVar: '='
}
The goal is to run certain parts of the directive only if a variable holds true. I'm setting that variable in the controller and trying to pass it into the directive through an attr.
The problem is that when I do something like
<div ng-controller="MyCtrl" my-directive active="ctrlVar"></div>
and try to get active in the directive with scope.active, it always comes up undefined.
Here is an example: http://jsfiddle.net/u3t2u/1/
Any explanation as to why or how to properly do this? I assume the problem is with the controller and directive being applied to the same element and wish to get around that.
Another option would be to remove the directive's isolate scope and have it evaluate an attr passed to it, but I'm not sure how to do that ($parse keeps throwing errors).
That is because your directive is not inside the controller. Try this:
<div ng-app="myApp">
<div ng-controller="MyCtrl">
<div my-directive="" active="myValue">
Testing.
</div>
</div>
</div>
Ended up changing the way I structured the directive because it wasn't something that should really have had an isolate scope, and the only reason it did was so it could take expressions and evaluate them to true or false.
So I changed it to use $parse, which left the directive looking something like:
var active = $parse(attrs.isActive);
// Evaluate contents of attrs.isActive
// as if they are variables within its scope,
// which is inherited from parent scopes
if(active(scope)) {
// do something
}
I am not too familiar with certain things like transclude and creating an isolated scope, but this is what I got after reading the docs for Directives and fiddling around:
http://jsfiddle.net/u3t2u/4/
I only changed this portion of the html:
<div ng-controller="MyCtrl">
<div my-directive active="myValue">
Testing.
</div>
</div>
I believe that in this case, you do not actually have to pass a value to the my-directive directive, since you are already using an isolate scope with an =. Sorry if my explanation is not that good. You can read more at http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive , under the section Writing directives (long version).