How to 'unwatch' an expression

Question

Say I have an ng-repeat with a big array.

When ng-repeat runs, it adds every element of that array to an isolated scope, as well as having the array itself in a scop

Answer 1

Edit: see the other answer I posted.

I've gone and implemented blesh's idea in a seperable way. My ngOnce directive just destroys the child scope that ngRepeat creates on each item. This means the scope doesn't get reached from its parents' scope.$digest and the watchers are never executed.

Source and example on JSFiddle

The directive itself:

angular.module('transclude', [])
 .directive('ngOnce', ['$timeout', function($timeout){
    return {
      restrict: 'EA',
      priority: 500,
      transclude: true,
      template: '
',
        compile: function (tElement, tAttrs, transclude) {
            return function postLink(scope, iElement, iAttrs, controller) {
                $timeout(scope.$destroy.bind(scope), 0);
            }
        }
    };
}]);

Using it:

      

          {{item.title}}: {{item.text}}
      

Note ng-once doesn't create its own scope which means it can affect sibling elements. These all do the same thing:

  

      {{item.title}}: {{item.text}}
  
  

      
          {{item.title}}: {{item.text}}
      
  
  

      {{item.title}}: {{item.text}} 
  

Note this may be a bad idea