I'm working on a bigger project with AngularJS. Therefore, I want to make the work for a single form as easy as possible. As we're also using bootstrap, the code for a single input field in a form is quite verbose, maybe like
<div class="control-group">
<label class="control-label" for="inputEmail">Email</label>
<div class="controls">
<input type="text" id="inputEmail" placeholder="Email">
</div>
</div>
If I could write a single tag like
<custom-input
label="Email"
name="inputEmail"
placeholder="Email"
type="text"
... >
</custom-input>
instead, this would help to keep the code clean and the work simple.
To achive this, I'm working on a custom AngularJS directive. My directive currently uses a template similar to the bootstrap example from above, automatically assigning the label to the input-tag. Also, the directive's compiler function moves all attributes from the custom-input tag to the real input-tag in order to make it easy to customize the custom-input tag.
app.directive('customInput', function() {
return {
require: 'ngModel',
restrict: 'E',
template: '<div>' +
'<label for="{{ name }}">the label</label>' +
'<input id="{{ name }}" ng-model="ngModel" />' +
'</div>',
scope: {
ngModel: '=',
name: '@name',
},
replace: true,
compile: function (tElement, tAttrs, transclude) {
var tInput = tElement.find('input');
// Move the attributed given to 'custom-input'
// to the real input field
angular.forEach(tAttrs, function(value, key) {
if (key.charAt(0) == '$')
return;
tInput.attr(key, value);
tInput.parent().removeAttr(key);
});
return;
},
};
});
On Stack Overflow, there are many questions regarding the creation of custom input fields, but they are concerned with the data binding, custom formatting or binding to ng-repeat.
My approach however has a different issue: while the data binding works correctly, Angular's integrated form validation module get confused when the input field is 'required'. For some reason, validation doesn't recognize the new input field and instead keeps the form invalid because of some dead reference, which has an empty value. Please see the minimal example.
Where does the dead reference come from? How can I update the validation-module's references? Is there a better way to achieve my overall goal?
