AngularJS: How to run additional code after AngularJS has rendered a template?

Question

I have an Angular template in the DOM. When my controller gets new data from a service, it updates the model in the $scope, and re-renders the template. All good so far.

The issue is that I need to also do some extra work after the template has been re-rendered and is in the DOM (in this case a jQuery plugin).

It seems like there should be an event to listen to, such as AfterRender, but I can't find any such thing. Maybe a directive would be a way to go, but it seemed to fire too early as well.

Here is a jsFiddle outlining my problem: Fiddle-AngularIssue

== UPDATE ==

Based on helpful comments, I've accordingly switched to a directive to handle DOM manipulation, and implemented a model $watch inside the directive. However, I still am having the same base issue; the code inside of the $watch event fires before the template has been compiled and inserted into the DOM, therefore, the jquery plugin is always evaluating an empty table.

Interestingly, if I remove the async call the whole thing works fine, so that's a step in the right direction.

Here is my updated Fiddle to reflect these changes: http://jsfiddle.net/uNREn/12/

Answer 1

First, the right place to mess with rendering are directives. My advice would be to wrap DOM manipulating jQuery plugins by directives like this one.

I had the same problem and came up with this snippet. It uses $watch and $evalAsync to ensure your code runs after directives like ng-repeat have been resolved and templates like {{ value }} got rendered.

app.directive('name', function() {
    return {
        link: function($scope, element, attrs) {
            // Trigger when number of children changes,
            // including by directives like ng-repeat
            var watch = $scope.$watch(function() {
                return element.children().length;
            }, function() {
                // Wait for templates to render
                $scope.$evalAsync(function() {
                    // Finally, directives are evaluated
                    // and templates are renderer here
                    var children = element.children();
                    console.log(children);
                });
            });
        },
    };
});

Hope this can help you prevent some struggle.