The Angular way
The correct Angular way to do this is to write a single page app, AJAX in the form template, then populate it dynamically from the model. The model is not populated from the form by default because the model is the single source of truth. Instead Angular will go the other way and try to populate the form from the model.
If however, you don't have time to start over from scratch
If you have an app written, this might involve some fairly hefty architectural changes. If you're trying to use Angular to enhance an existing form, rather than constructing an entire single page app from scratch, you can pull the value from the form and store it in the scope at link time using a directive. Angular will then bind the value in the scope back to the form and keep it in sync.
Using a directive
You can use a relatively simple directive to pull the value from the form and load it in to the current scope. Here I've defined an initFromForm directive.
var myApp = angular.module("myApp", ['initFromForm']);
angular.module('initFromForm', [])
.directive("initFromForm", function ($parse) {
return {
link: function (scope, element, attrs) {
var attr = attrs.initFromForm || attrs.ngModel || element.attrs('name'),
val = attrs.value;
if (attrs.type === "number") {val = parseInt(val)}
$parse(attr).assign(scope, val);
}
};
});
You can see I've defined a couple of fallbacks to get a model name. You can use this directive in conjunction with the ngModel directive, or bind to something other than $scope if you prefer.
Use it like this:
<input name="test" ng-model="toaster.test" value="hello" init-from-form />
{{toaster.test}}
Note this will also work with textareas, and select dropdowns.
<textarea name="test" ng-model="toaster.test" init-from-form>hello</textarea>
{{toaster.test}}