Angular Directive to Prepend Group Header - angularjs

Question

I'm currently working on my first Ionic app and with it my first exposure to Angular. My current hurdle is injecting group headers ("A", "B", "C", and so on) into a longish list (~600) of alphabetically sorted names. I've looked into solutions with filters, nested ngRepeats (which, specifically, didn't seem to play nice with Ionic's collection-repeat), but would like to accomplish this without the need for filtering or third-party dependencies like lodash or underscores.
My current target solution is to use a directive to prepend the header to the first element of each group of names.
The app is consuming content from Contentful's API and in the service I'm manually adding a group identifier based on the name's first letter. An example data set might be:
[
{"id":"1","name":"Carrie","group":"C"},
{"id":"2","name":"Gabe","group":"G"},
{"id":"3","name":"Gerry","group":"G"},
{"id":"4","name":"Hector","group":"H"},
{"id":"5","name":"Hilbert","group":"H"}
]
Here's the template:
<ion-content>
<ion-list>
<div collection-repeat="person in People" group-header>
<ion-item class="item-icon-right" type="item-text-wrap" href="#/app/people/{{ person.id }}" group="{{ person.group }}">
<h2>{{ person.name }}</h2>
<i class="icon ion-chevron-right icon-accessory"></i>
</ion-item>
</div>
</ion-list>
</ion-content>
Here's the directive:
.directive('groupHeader', function () {
return {
compile: function (element) {
element.prepend('<div class="item item-divider" is-divider>{{ person.group }}</div>');
}
}
})
And currently, as expected, the prepend occurs for each repeated item:
<div collection-repeat="name in Names" group-header>
<div class="item item-divider ng-binding">C</div>
<ion-item class="item-icon-right item item-complex" type="item-text-wrap" href="#/app/names/1" group="C">
<a class="item-content" ng-href="#/app/names/1" href="#/app/names/1">
<h2 class="ng-binding">Carrie</h2>
<i class="icon ion-chevron-right icon-accessory"></i>
</a>
</ion-item>
</div>
<div collection-repeat="name in Names" group-header>
<div class="item item-divider ng-binding">G</div>
<ion-item class="item-icon-right item item-complex" type="item-text-wrap" href="#/app/names/2" group="G">
<a class="item-content" ng-href="#/app/names/2" href="#/app/names/2">
<h2 class="ng-binding">Gabe</h2>
<i class="icon ion-chevron-right icon-accessory"></i>
</a>
</ion-item>
</div>
I'd like to know if there are any recommendations for updating the directive so that it only prepends on the first instance of name in a given group. I'm happy to be pointed to resources, rather than a longhand solution--but either will be much appreciated.
Thanks!

Answer 1

I was able to accomplish what I was after with an ng-switch in the template:
<ion-content>
<ion-list>
<div collection-repeat="person in People">
<ng-switch on="$first || person.group != People[$index-1].group">
<ion-item type="item-text-wrap" ng-switch-when="true">
{{ person.group }}
</ion-item>
</ng-switch>
<ion-item class="item-icon-right" type="item-text-wrap" href="#/app/people/{{ person.id }}" group="{{ person.group }}">
<h2>{{ person.name }}</h2>
<i class="icon ion-chevron-right icon-accessory"></i>
</ion-item>
</div>
</ion-list>
</ion-content>
Thanks to: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14076254/3426040.