AngularJS watch DOM change

Question

I have one auto-carousel directive which iterates through the linked element's children.

The children however are not yet loaded in the DOM, because their ng-ifs expressions have not been parsed yet.

How can I make sure the parent directive knows there have been changes to it's DOM tree?

        <ul class="unstyled" auto-carousel>
          <li class="slide" ng-if="name">{{name}}</li>
          ...
          <li class="slide" ng-if="email">{{email}}</li>
        </ul>

I could use $timeout but that feels unreliable. I could also use ng-show instead of ng-if but that does not answer the question and not what I need.

Answer 1

So here's what I ended up doing:

I discovered you could pass a function to $scope.$watch. From there, it's pretty straightforward to return the value of the expression you want to watch for changes. It will work exactly like passing a key string for a property on the scope.

link: function ($scope, $el, $attrs) {
  $scope.$watch(
    function () { return $el[0].childNodes.length; },
    function (newValue, oldValue) {
      if (newValue !== oldValue) {
        // code goes here
      }
    }
  );
}

I am watching childNodes, not children, because the childNodes list holds elements as well as text nodes and comments. This is priceless because Angular uses comment placeholders for directives like ng-repeat, ng-if, ng-switch and ng-include which perform transclusion and alter the DOM, while children only holds elements.

Answer 2

If you need to watch for any changes deeper in the element's dom, MutationObserver is the way to go :

.directive('myDirective', function() {
    return {
        ...
        link: function(scope, element, attrs) {
            var observer = new MutationObserver(function(mutations) {
                // your code here ...
            });
            observer.observe(element[0], {
                childList: true,
                subtree: true
            });
        }
    };
});

Answer 3

I created a directive module for this angular-dom-events

In your case you could

    <ul class="unstyled" auto-carousel>
      <li class="slide" ng-if="name" dom-on-create="nameCreated()">{{name}}</li>
      <li class="slide" ng-if="email" dom-on-destroy="emailDestroyed()">{{email}}</li>
    </ul>

Currently only supports dom-on-create and dom-on-destroy, but has better performance then the accepted answer because it will only fire once for each dom event, rather than repeatedly check the $watch callback.

Answer 4

Although I don't think it is with angular's recommendations, you could use ng-init which fires upon the initialization of the element:

<ul class="unstyled" auto-carousel>
    <li class="slide" ng-if="name" ng-init="recheck()">{{name}}</li>
    <li class="slide" ng-if="email" ng-init="recheck()">{{email}}</li>
</ul>

Answer 5

You could try to compile the directive contents first inside your link function. For example:

angular.module('myApp').directive('autoCarousel', ['$compile', function ($compile) {

    return {
        templateUrl: 'views/auto-carousel.html',
        restrict: 'A',
        replace: true,
        link: function (scope, element, attr) {
            $compile(element.contents())(scope);

            // your code goes here
        }
    }
}]);