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Understanding AngularJS digest life-cycle

05 Aug 2022
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The digest loop is responsible to update DOM elements with the changes made to the model as well as executing any registered watcher functions.

The $digest loop is fired when the browser receives an event that can be managed by the angular context. This loop is made up of two smaller loops. One processes the $evalAsync queue and the other one processes the $watch list.

The $digest loop keeps iterating until the $evalAsync queue is empty and the $watch list does not detect any changes in the model. The $evalAsync queue contains those tasks which are scheduled by $evalAsync() function from a directive or controller.

The $watch list contains watches correspondence to each DOM element which is bound to the $scope object. These watches are resolved in the $digest loop through a process called dirty checking. The dirty checking is a process which checks whether a value has changed, if the value has changed, it set the $scope as dirty. If the $scope is dirty, another $digest loop is triggered.

When you do the changes to the scope outside the angular context, you have to call $apply() function explicitly on the scope to trigger $digest cycle immediately.

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