angularjs - Angular filter works but causes "10 $digest iterations reached"

Question

I receive data from my back end server structured like this:

{
  name : "Mc Feast",
  owner :  "Mc Donalds"
}, 
{
  name : "Royale with cheese",
  owner :  "Mc Donalds"
}, 
{
  name : "Whopper",
  owner :  "Burger King"
}

For my view I would like to "invert" the list. I.e. I want to list each owner, and for that owner list all hamburgers. I can achieve this by using the underscorejs function groupBy in a filter which I then use in with the ng-repeat directive:

JS:

app.filter("ownerGrouping", function() {
  return function(collection) {
    return _.groupBy(collection, function(item) {
      return item.owner;
    });
  }
 });

HTML:

<li ng-repeat="(owner, hamburgerList) in hamburgers | ownerGrouping">
  {{owner}}:  
  <ul>
    <li ng-repeat="burger in hamburgerList | orderBy : 'name'">{{burger.name}}</li>
  </ul>
</li>

This works as expected but I get an enormous error stack trace when the list is rendered with the error message "10 $digest iterations reached". I have a hard time seeing how my code creates an infinite loop which is implied by this message. Does any one know why?

Here is a link to a plunk with the code: http://plnkr.co/edit/8kbVuWhOMlMojp0E5Qbs?p=preview

Answer 1

This happens because _.groupBy returns a collection of new objects every time it runs. Angular's ngRepeat doesn't realize that those objects are equal because ngRepeat tracks them by identity. New object leads to new identity. This makes Angular think that something has changed since the last check, which means that Angular should run another check (aka digest). The next digest ends up getting yet another new set of objects, and so another digest is triggered. The repeats until Angular gives up.

One easy way to get rid of the error is to make sure your filter returns the same collection of objects every time (unless of course it has changed). You can do this very easily with underscore by using _.memoize. Just wrap the filter function in memoize:

app.filter("ownerGrouping", function() {
  return _.memoize(function(collection, field) {
    return _.groupBy(collection, function(item) {
      return item.owner;
    });
  }, function resolver(collection, field) {
    return collection.length + field;
  })
});

A resolver function is required if you plan to use different field values for your filters. In the example above, the length of the array is used. A better be to reduce the collection to a unique md5 hash string.

See plunker fork here. Memoize will remember the result of a specific input and return the same object if the input is the same as before. If the values change frequently though then you should check if _.memoize discards old results to avoid a memory leak over time.

Investigating a bit further I see that ngRepeat supports an extended syntax ... track by EXPRESSION, which might be helpful somehow by allowing you to tell Angular to look at the owner of the restaurants instead of the identity of the objects. This would be an alternative to the memoization trick above, though I couldn't manage to test it in the plunker (possibly old version of Angular from before track by was implemented?).