filter and orderBy should also work with objects in ngRepeat

[nodecode]

filter and orderBy should work with objects within ngRepeat. My use case for this, I have already written recently in #1286, but the issue only refers to oderBy and has previously been rejected seemingly because no concrete use case has been found for this.

Here is my use case where I absolutely need an object instead of an array:

I'm currently developing a real-time browser game with AngularJS, in which I have a room list. To update individual entries in this list, the server sends a notification with the new version of this single entry when it changes. Thus, a single entry can be by ID, provided by the server, updated, I need to use an object instead of an array.

I would like to sort these entries with AngularJS, which, however, currently not working. I would be happy if this feature will be implemented soon. Otherwise, I had to write such a function myself, which I however come back in the boilerplate code hell.

A support of objects in filter and orderBy of AngularJS for me would be really helpful as I would otherwise have to try myself to implement such a function.

[petebacondarwin]

This is easy to fix using a toArray filter.

Here is a solution that uses @finalclass's toArray filter (remembering that this will not work on IE8): http://jsfiddle.net/z8ME5/

Here is a version that uses toArray but actually modifies the original object (and will work on IE8):
http://jsfiddle.net/JHL6X/

[petebacondarwin]

And here is a version with a filter: http://jsfiddle.net/75LLk/

[petebacondarwin]

I have created a module that provides the toArray filter for helping with these situations

http://ngmodules.org/modules/angular-toArrayFilter

[mohsen1]

I am having a problem with lack of built in orderBy support in Angular. The toArray is not working for me because it makes angular re-render the entire array which looks bad in my case because I want to update my document per kepress.

It would be nice if I could sort my object values without converting it to an array.

[petebacondarwin]

@mohsen1 - you can always achieve what you want by doing the ordering in a controller: watching the object, ordering it and attaching the ordered list to the scope, which you can then bind to. But regarding toArray filter, it should be maintaining object references in the array so ng-repeat should not be re-rendering on every digest. What is you use case?

[kcrwfrd]

People are advocating for a toArray filter, and while I think that keeps good separation of concerns, I believe it would be costly performance-wise. Filters in the view may be invoked many times.

[caitp]

there have been recent fixes to that problem @kvcrawford --- they will now (by default) be treated as pure and only re-run if their inputs change

[wesleycho]

Given that this has been rejected for filterFilter in #2694, this probably should be closed as won't support since orderBy suffers the same issues.

[petebacondarwin]

Yes, I agree - and we have a performance workaround.