ngOptions required ngModel

[reidreid46]

ngModel is required to see any output put into a ngOptions. If ngModel is ommitted, no options are created, and no warning is given.

Possible to?:
a) not require ngModel, display options regardless
b) or show some kind of warning when ngOptions is used without ngModel

[caitp]

Yeah I dunno, I just asked about this. I don't think it would be unreasonable to emit a warning at the very least.

I'm not sure if a patch adding this would be accepted, but it should be pretty trivial to write. Something like

link: function(scope, element, attr, ctrls) {
      // if ngModel is not defined, we don't need to do anything
      if (attr.ngOptions && !ctrls[1]) {
        $log.warn("attempting to use ngOptions directive without ngModel!");
        return;
      }

in the ngOptions directive, should be a good way to inform you, I guess. It's kind of tricky though, maybe.

[caitp]

Brian said it would be worth doing, so maybe we could land a fix for this after all =) Feel free to submit a patch and become a contributor! (caveat: Igor wants to get rid of ng-options, so it might be solved in a different way instead)

[btford]

I actually told @reidreid46 to file this, haha. We ran into this today.

[liorboord]

@caitp I can see your point and was about to add what you suggested to the code. However, I don't see any use of "log." or "warn" in the entire Angular's Directive's directory code. My guess is that the convention is not to warn about such things. what do you think?

[btford]

I think this might belong in our WIP hinting library. /cc @caguillen214 @ealtenho

[petebacondarwin]

Since ngOptions without ngModel does nothing at the moment, it is fundamentally pointless. Therefore I think we should just throw an error if there is an ngOptions without ngModel.

Although this is a breaking change (for 1.5) it shouldn't affect anyone in practice since you get no benefit without it.

Does anyone have a view on that?

[Narretz]

We can simply remove the optional modifier to the ngOptions.require property. It's probably leftover from when ngOptions was an attribute to the select directive.

[Narretz]

See #12840