Angular form 1.3 tightly coupled - angularjs

Question

Does anyone of you think that the form in angular 1.3 is causing tightly coupling between the controller and the DOM? This is an anti pattern of Angular.
For example, when giving a form the name='formExample' attribute, to set it to dirty or invalid programmily, in the controller we have to do $scope.formExample.$setDirty()
This is a bad practice!
Waiting to hear your thoughts!
Example :
this.onSaveClicked = function () {
that.saveMessage = that.SAVING_IN_PROGRESS;
//Update project with changes
ProjectsBLL.update($scope.entities.project.Model, function (data) {
$scope.entities.project.Model = data;
$scope.configurationForm.$setPristine();
that.saveMessage = that.SAVING_FINISHED;
}, null)
}

Answer 1

It sounds like you don't want the following line in the controller
$scope.configurationForm.$setPristine();
To achieve this, one way is to:
Change ProjectsBLL.update to return a promise rather than accept a callback (how to do this is probably beyond the scope of this question). Then also return the derived promise from then from the function in the controller:
this.onSaveClicked = function () {
that.saveMessage = that.SAVING_IN_PROGRESS;
//Update project with changes
return ProjectsBLL.update($scope.entities.project.Model).then(function (data) {
$scope.entities.project.Model = data;
that.saveMessage = that.SAVING_FINISHED;
});
}
And then use a custom directive rather than ng-click to call the save function. There are probably a few ways of doing this, but one is to add one that takes a function as an attribute:
<button type="button" my-submit="onSaveClicked()">Save</button>
which adds a manual click listener, calls the passed function on click, and after its returned promise is resolved, calls $setPristine() on a requireed form:
app.directive('mySubmit', function($parse) {
return {
require: '^form',
link: function(scope, element, attrs, formController) {
var callback = $parse(attrs.mySubmit);
element.on('click', function() {
callback(scope, {}).then(function() {
formController.$setPristine();
});
});
}
};
});
A version of this, just using a $timeout to simulate a call to $http can be seen at http://plnkr.co/edit/IdcfQ4N9MhDKdvyorzeO?p=preview