How to implement an ng-change for a custom directive

Question

I have a directive with a template like

Answer 1

Samuli Ulmanen and lucienBertin's answers nail it, although a bit of further reading in the AngularJS documentation provides further advise on how to handle this (see https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/type/ngModel.NgModelController).

Specifically in the cases where you are passing objects to $setViewValue(myObj). AngularJS Documentatation states:

When used with standard inputs, the view value will always be a string (which is in some cases parsed into another type, such as a Date object for input[date].) However, custom controls might also pass objects to this method. In this case, we should make a copy of the object before passing it to $setViewValue. This is because ngModel does not perform a deep watch of objects, it only looks for a change of identity. If you only change the property of the object then ngModel will not realize that the object has changed and will not invoke the $parsers and $validators pipelines. For this reason, you should not change properties of the copy once it has been passed to $setViewValue. Otherwise you may cause the model value on the scope to change incorrectly.

For my specific case, my model is a moment date object, so I must clone the object first before then calling setViewValue. I am lucky here as moment provides a simple clone method: var b = moment(a);

link : function(scope, elements, attrs, ctrl) {
    scope.updateModel = function (value) {
        if (ctrl.$viewValue == value) {
            var copyOfObject = moment(value);
            ctrl.$setViewValue(copyOfObject);
        }
        else
        {
            ctrl.$setViewValue(value);
        }
    };
}