angularjs - Update scope value when service data is changed

Question

I have the following service in my app:

uaInProgressApp.factory('uaProgressService', 
    function(uaApiInterface, $timeout, $rootScope){
        var factory = {};
        factory.taskResource = uaApiInterface.taskResource()
        factory.taskList = [];
        factory.cron = undefined;
        factory.updateTaskList = function() {
            factory.taskResource.query(function(data){
                factory.taskList = data;
                $rootScope.$digest
                console.log(factory.taskList);
            });
            factory.cron = $timeout(factory.updateTaskList, 5000);
        }

        factory.startCron = function () {
            factory.cron = $timeout(factory.updateTaskList, 5000);
        }

        factory.stopCron = function (){
            $timeout.cancel(factory.cron);
        }
        return factory;
});

Then I use it in a controller like this:

uaInProgressApp.controller('ua.InProgressController',
    function ($scope, $rootScope, $routeParams, uaContext, uaProgressService) {
        uaContext.getSession().then(function(){
            uaContext.appName.set('Testing house');
            uaContext.subAppName.set('In progress');
            uaProgressService.startCron();

            $scope.taskList = uaProgressService.taskList;
        });
    }
);

So basically my service update factory.taskList every 5 seconds and I linked this factory.taskList to $scope.taskList. I then tried different methods like $apply, $digest but changes on factory.taskList are not reflected in my controller and view $scope.taskList.

It remains empty in my template. Do you know how I can propagate these changes ?

Answer 1

While using $watch may solve the problem, it is not the most efficient solution. You might want to change the way you are storing the data in the service.

The problem is that you are replacing the memory location that your taskList is associated to every time you assign it a new value while the scope is stuck pointing to the old location. You can see this happening in this plunk.

Take a heap snapshots with Chrome when you first load the plunk and, after you click the button, you will see that the memory location the scope points to is never updated while the list points to a different memory location.

You can easily fix this by having your service hold an object that contains the variable that may change (something like data:{task:[], x:[], z:[]}). In this case "data" should never be changed but any of its members may be changed whenever you need to. You then pass this data variable to the scope and, as long as you don't override it by trying to assign "data" to something else, whenever a field inside data changes the scope will know about it and will update correctly.

This plunk shows the same example running using the fix suggested above. No need to use any watchers in this situation and if it ever happens that something is not updated on the view you know that all you need to do is run a scope $apply to update the view.

This way you eliminate the need for watchers that frequently compare variables for changes and the ugly setup involved in cases when you need to watch many variables. The only issue with this approach is that on your view (html) you will have "data." prefixing everything where you used to just have the variable name.