Without giving it too much thought, I suspect that this will lead to unexpected results if a promise gets resolved after the next call to getDisplayValue().

@gkalpak I think your right.

$q doesn't have a cancel() so I think we could possibly assign the promises id's and check if its the latest when we go to use it. But I'm open to any other suggestions. I think this would really only emerge when a user has a bad network but it's still a problem.

I made select() clear the search text and selected item when getDisplayValue() is rejected.

@ThomasBurleson Any chance this will be merged for 0.10.0? I can get it working 0.9.7 today if you want to try and merge it. I've had about 20 people using it for a while now.

@epelc - working on this now.
@robertmesserle - can you review this; since your are the primary author of AutoComplete.

@ThomasBurleson Cool! Do you want me to get it working with the current master? There were several additions and fixes for auto complete since I first created this but it shouldn't take too long to update.

@ThomasBurleson @epelc 👍

@epelc - yes. plz rebase with master.

Everything works besides the tests now. I'll get them running first thing tomorrow morning. I was having trouble getting karma to run on this machine.

Also I found #3546 while upgrading everything.

@robertmesserle Can you take a quick look?

@epelc - you did not provide a unit test for this promise-based internal feature.
Currently we have:

/**
   * Returns the display value for an item.
   * @param item
   * @returns {*}
   */
  function getDisplayValue (item) {
    return $q.when( getItemText(item) || item );

    /**
     * Getter function to invoke user-defined expression (in the directive)
     * to convert your object to a single string.
     */
    function getItemText(item) {
      return (item && $scope.itemText) ? $scope.itemText(getItemAsNameVal(item)) : null;
    }
  }

where the $scope.itemText() expression may return a promise. We should test that....

I will merge this PR. Can you provide another with unit tests?

@ThomasBurleson I'm trying to make a unit test for it now. I can just add it to this if you want.

Oops.

It's fine I'll make a new pr.

Does this look ok? I haven't written many karma tests before. I have this right after the basic functionality tests here. Would you organize it this way or make a new Describe()?

it('should support promises with md-item-text', inject(function($timeout, $mdConstant, $q) {
      var scope = createScope();

      scope.displayItem = function(item) {
        var deferred = $q.defer();

        $timeout(function() {
          deferred.resolve(item.display+'-promise');
        });

        return deferred.promise;
      }

      var template = '\
          <md-autocomplete\
              md-selected-item="selectedItem"\
              md-search-text="searchText"\
              md-items="item in match(searchText)"\
              md-item-text="displayItem(item)"\
              placeholder="placeholder">\
            <span md-highlight-text="searchText">{{item.display}}</span>\
          </md-autocomplete>';
      var element = compile(template, scope);
      var ctrl    = element.controller('mdAutocomplete');

      element.scope().searchText = 'fo';
      element.scope().$apply();
      $timeout.flush();

      ctrl.keydown({ keyCode: $mdConstant.KEY_CODE.DOWN_ARROW, preventDefault: angular.noop });
      ctrl.keydown({ keyCode: $mdConstant.KEY_CODE.ENTER, preventDefault: angular.noop });
      scope.$apply();
      $timeout.flush();

      expect(scope.searchText).toBe('foo-promise');
    }));

@ThomasBurleson ping

Can you look at the above. I forgot to mention you.