I'm stuck on something that I was expecting with AngularJS to work out of the box without any issues, and yet strangely enough...
I'm using a JSON service that returns data as a 2D array:
$scope.data= [
["val-11", "val-12", "val-13"],
["val-21", "val-22", "val-23"]
];
From this I'm trying to generate a table like this:
<table>
<tr ng-repeat="row in data">
<td ng-repeat="col in row">{{col}}</td>
</tr>
</table>
I don't understand why AngularJS doesn't handle such a basic scenario. I can get correct $index for the parent loop, if I need it, I can iterate through the values, but only with one loop like this "col in data[0]", but I cannot get any result trying to use the nested loop as shown above.
Am I doing something wrong? It just seems to be too basic not to work right away. Please somebody help me with this bizarre issue.
In Angular 1.0.x the ng-repeat directive had numerous bugs caused by trying to "guess" whether non-object values (i.e. strings or numbers) had been added, removed or moved. The problem is that non-objects have no identity of their own, so it is impossible to track them accurately. This was problematic in a number of cases and also caused the ngRepeat code to be bloated with loads of workarounds and edge cases.
In 1.2 we improved the syntax for ng-repeat to allow the developer to specify for themselves exactly how to identify items in a collection. This is done by the "track by" keyword. One consequence of this is that we disallow items which have the same identifier.
By default ng-repeat will try to track by the value of the item. If you have repeated items such as the same object or identical strings or numbers then ng-repeat will complain and you will see the error in the console.
var TableCtrl = function($scope) {
$scope.data= [
["", "", "val-13"]
];
}
Here the first two items in the sub-array are the same "empty" string. See this fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/tEU8r/
If you really do want to have repeated items in the collection then you need to provide a method for ng-repeat to distinguish them. The simplest and obvious approach is to track the items by their position in the collection. This is done by using "track by $index". Here is the same example but fixed in this way:
<table ng-controller="TableCtrl">
<tr ng-repeat="row in data">
<td ng-repeat="col in row track by $index">
{{$parent.$index}}-{{$index}} {{col}}
</td>
</tr>
</table>
http://jsfiddle.net/h44Z8/
So this is not a bug in AngularJS. But you are correct that people should be aware of this change when upgrading to 1.2
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