AngularJS ng-repeat to populate grid from array

Question

Thanks in advance for reading. I am trying to utilize angular's ng-repeat to render objects from an array into an Nx3 Table. For the sake of example let's consider a 3x3 table.

Here is a simplified example of the array:

objects = [{"text": "One, One"},{"text": "One, Two"},{"text": "One, Three"},
           {"text": "Two, One"},{"text": "Two, Two"},{"text": "Two, Three"},
           {"text": "Three, One"},{"text": "Three, Two"},{"text": "Three, Three"}];

The "text" field describes where in the 3x3 grid matrix each element should appear. I would like to use ng-repeat on objects to generate html that looks like this:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>One, One</td>
    <td>One, Two</td>
    <td>One, Three</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Two, One</td>
    <td>Two, Two</td>
    <td>Two, Three</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Three, One</td>
    <td>Three, Two</td>
    <td>Three, Three</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Is there any way to achieve this without needing to break up the array into separate arrays for each row?

Answer 1

Best possibly way would be to alter your view model in the controller and bind that to ng-repeat (But you already said you do not want to do that). If you ever plan to take that route you can also take a look at user @m59 answer where he creates a reusable filter to do it. However this is just a simple answer making use of built in filter's configurable evaluation expression where we can return truthy/falsy value to determine if they need to be repeated or not. This eventually has the only advantage of no need to create 2 ng-repeat blocks (But that is not so bad though). So in your controller add a function on the scope,

$scope.getFiltered= function(obj, idx){
   //Set a property on the item being repeated with its actual index
   //return true only for every 1st item in 3 items
    return !((obj._index = idx) % 3); 
}

and in your view apply the filter:

  <tr ng-repeat="obj in objects | filter:getFiltered">
    <!-- Current item, i.e first of every third item -->
    <td>{{obj.text}}</td> 
    <!-- based on the _index property display the next 2 items (which have been already filtered out) -->
    <td>{{objects[obj._index+1].text}}</td>
    <td>{{objects[obj._index+2].text}}</td>
  </tr>

Plnkr