Linking MVC In AngularJS - angularjs

Question

I have a basic application in AngularJS. The model contains a number of items and associated tags of those items. What I'm trying to achieve is the ability to filter the items displayed so that only those with one or more active tags are displayed, however I'm not having a lot of luck with figuring out how to manipulate the model from the view.
The JS is available at http://jsfiddle.net/Qxbka/2 . This contains the state I have managed to reach so far, but I have two problems. First off, the directive attempts to call a method toggleTag() in the controller:
template: "<button class='btn' ng-repeat='datum in data' ng-click='toggleTag(datum.id)'>{{datum.name}}</button>"
but the method is not called. Second, I'm not sure how to alter the output section's ng-repeat so that it only shows items with one or more active tags.
Any pointers on what I'm doing wrong and how to get this working would be much appreciated.
Update
I updated the method in the directive to pass the data items directly, i.e.
template: "<button class='btn' ng-repeat='datum in data' ng-click='toggle(data, datum.id)'>{{datum.name}}</button>"
and also created a toggle() method in the directive. By doing this I can manipulate data and it is reflected in the state HTML, however I would appreciate any feedback as to if this is the correct way to do this (it doesn't feel quite right to me).
Still stuck on how to re-evaluate the output when a tag's value is updated.

Answer 1

You can use a filter (docs) on the ng-repeat:
<li ng-repeat="item in items | filter:tagfilter">...</li>
The argument to the filter expression can be many things, including a function on the scope that will get called once for each element in the array. If it returns true, the element will show up, if it returns false, it won't.
One way you could do this is to set up a selectedTags array on your scope, which you populate by watching the tags array:
$scope.$watch('tags', function() {
$scope.selectedTags = $scope.tags.reduce(function(selected, tag) {
if (tag._active) selected.push(tag.name);
return selected;
}, []);
}, true);
The extra true in there at the end makes angular compare the elements by equality vs reference (which we want, because we need it to watch the _active attribute on each tag.
Next you can set up a filter function:
$scope.tagfilter = function(item) {
// If no tags are selected, show all the items.
if ($scope.selectedTags.length === 0) return true;
return intersects($scope.selectedTags, item.tags);
}
With a quick and dirty helper function intersects that returns the intersection of two arrays:
function intersects(a, b) {
var i = 0, len = a.length, inboth = [];
for (i; i < len; i++) {
if (b.indexOf(a[i]) !== -1) inboth.push(a[i]);
}
return inboth.length > 0;
}
I forked your fiddle here to show this in action.
One small issue with the way you've gone about this is items have an array of tag "names" and not ids. So this example just works with arrays of tag names (I had to edit some of the initial data to make it consistent).