how to prevent AngularJs from having old view and new view on dom when route changes

Question

I am using a directive "slideable" which creates a slideout area and has a toggle. This code that was not written by me but it demonstrates a larger issue for me. When I changing views (most commonly /user/:id type), slideable is a directive used on the template. The directive searches for an element during its link function and binds a click event. The issue is that when I am changing routes and the new view ( same type but different id ) is being loaded the directive is re-binding to the old view. If I stop the browser in chrome during the link then I will see two ng-views on the dom and the issue is it binds to the one that is leaving.

I also have other issues that appear to be related to this phenomenon. Is it normal that the old view would still be on the dom while the new view is being formulated?? Why wouldnt the old-view be destroyed before the new one is rendered? How do I get around this issue in a directive like this?

Thanks.

I am looking to understand conceptually what is happening. I already modified the directive to select the latest view and to appropriately search and bind to the correct element. But I am a bit perplexed as to why there would be a state where both co-exist on the dom.

Answer 1

One definitive reason why the old HTML fragment is briefly present along with the new one is to support animation of transitions from the old to the new. Take a look at the ngView documentation and you'll see an example of an animated transition, and it'll be clear that this is not a bug or a design flaw.

Usually when someone has problems with binding to the right element or element's event, it's because they are selecting the element without limiting the scope of the selector to the HTML fragment being added or updated, or trying to target parts of the DOM outside of the directive. So that's the first place to check, that the directive is doing things right, but like I said we'll need code to check on that.