I'm pretty sure this is how it is supposed to work. ngForm does not keep track of which controls are pristine/dirty. Setting a control to $dirty will propagation the "dirty-ness" to the parent form controllers, but setting all controls to $pristine will not set the parent form(s) to $pristine as well.

It's not an unreasonable feature to request, but it would add a tiny bit of overhead (which won't be necessary for most apps).

If you need such functionality, you can always implement a work-around.
In any case, this will be much easier if/when we expose the controls array.

@Narretz, do you think it is reasonable to check if all controls are $pristine (whenever a control is set to $pristine) and set the parent form to $pristine too (if all controls are $pristine) ?

User expectation is probably that the form is set to $pristine, and I can see how that makes sense. We have the same problem with $setValidity, too, afaik.
I'm not to keen about implementing this logic. A parent form form would potentially need to loop through hundreds of children to determine its pristine-ness.
Either we make this check available behind a flag, or we expose the child forms / child controls on the form element, so that developers can loop over them themselves.

I wrote some brute force solution, but.. what if we will keep track of number of nested pristine controls/forms? 0 by default, it will be increased in $setPristin and decreased in $setDirty. By comparing it each time with controls.length we will get $pristine. I'm not sure what should happen when we add/remove controls, but i guess it can be solved too.

Having an internal counter also seems like a viable solution. I can't think of a corner case that could not be handled with such an implementation (if implemented properly).

Hi, thanks for considering this.

I understand that revalidating the entire form to check for $pristine is a an inexpensive operation relative to setting the form to $dirty when a single control is set dirty. I like the idea of counters for the $touched, $untouched, $pristine and $dirty status of each field, since we only care whether or not the counter is 0 each.

I take it this issue has never been resolved, and probably won't be?

@adamreisnz That's correct. It should be possible to implement this logic by using https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/type/form.FormController#$getControls and a custom $setPristine implementation.