Opening the angular-strap datepicker programmatically

Question

I am using AngularJS 1.2.12 and angular-strap 2.0.0-rc.2 (mgcrea.github.io/angular-strap/) and I can't find a way to open the datepicker/timepicker widget from within the controller. I want to use an input-group with a calendar-icon-button like this:

<div class="input-group">
    <input class="form-control" ng-model="searchRequest.from_created" data-autoclose="1" bs-datepicker type="text">
    <span class="input-group-btn">
        <button type="button" class="btn btn-default">
        <i class="glyphicon glyphicon-calendar"></i></button>
    </span>
</div>

I now could easily provide an ng-click function for the button and open the calendar from my controller. I just can't find a way how to do this. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Another solution is to change the button to a label, and use the 'for' attribute. I like it because it eliminates extra javascript to open the datepicker, and also when tabbing the cursor won't stop on the icon anymore.

<div class="input-group">
    <input id="createdDate" name="createdDate" class="form-control" ng-model="searchRequest.from_created" data-autoclose="1" bs-datepicker type="text">
    <span class="input-group-btn">
        <label class="btn btn-default" for="createdDate">
        <i class="glyphicon glyphicon-calendar"></i></label>
    </span>
</div>

Answer 2

The documentation talks about opening the datepicker programmatically, but it doesn't give an easy way to get a reference to a datepicker that's already bound to an element.

In a project I'm working on I have a datepicker directive that wraps almost exactly the HTML you have into a myDatepicker directive. Inside that directive the ng-click method bound to the <button> element is essentially:

scope.openDatepicker = function() {
  element.children('input').focus();
}

which worked well enough for me.

Since angular-strap has been rewritten to get rid of any bootstrap.js dependencies a lot of bugs and oddities have been introduced. I'm working on upgrading my project's codebase to the newer version of angular-strap, and I feel like going with UI Bootstrap would have been a better choice, since its codebase is a bit more mature.