Accessing clicked element in angularjs

Question

I'm relatively new to AngularJS and suspect I'm not grasping a concept. I'm also using Twitter Bootstrap and I've got jQuery loaded.

Workflow: User clicks a link from a list, "master" section is updated and link user clicked on gains active class.

Basic HTML Markup:

<ul class="list-holder" ng-controller="adminController">
   <li><a ng-click="setMaster('client')">Clients</li>
   <li><a ng-click="setMaster('employees')">Employees</li>
   <li><a ng-click="setMaster('etc')>Etc...</li>
</ul>

Doing this in jQuery:

jQuery(".list-holder").on('click', 'a', function(event){
    event.preventDefault();
jQuery(".list-holder li").removeClass('active');
jQuery(this).parent('li').addClass('active');
});

But I can't figure out how to integrate Angular and jQuery to get this done, because I'm using Angular to fetch the master list (in JSON form) from the server and update a list on the page.

How do I integrate this? I can't seem to find the element I've clicked on once I'm inside the angular controller function

Controller:

function adminController($scope)
    {    
        $scope.setMaster = function(obj)
        {
            // How do I get clicked element's parent li?
            console.log(obj);
        }
    }

Answer 1

While AngularJS allows you to get a hand on a click event (and thus a target of it) with the following syntax (note the $event argument to the setMaster function; documentation here: http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngClick):

function AdminController($scope) {    
  $scope.setMaster = function(obj, $event){
    console.log($event.target);
  }
}

this is not very angular-way of solving this problem. With AngularJS the focus is on the model manipulation. One would mutate a model and let AngularJS figure out rendering.

The AngularJS-way of solving this problem (without using jQuery and without the need to pass the $event argument) would be:

<div ng-controller="AdminController">
    <ul class="list-holder">
        <li ng-repeat="section in sections" ng-class="{active : isSelected(section)}">
            <a ng-click="setMaster(section)">{{section.name}}</a>
        </li>
    </ul>
    <hr>
    {{selected | json}}
</div>

where methods in the controller would look like this:

$scope.setMaster = function(section) {
    $scope.selected = section;
}

$scope.isSelected = function(section) {
    return $scope.selected === section;
}

Here is the complete jsFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/pkozlowski_opensource/WXJ3p/15/