stacked directive not executed if ng-if is present

[godmar]

When stacking directives on top of a template-expanding directive, the stacked directive may or may not be executed depending on the template. The presence of ng-if, in particular, appears to influence whether stacked directives are applied. Occurs in 1.2.20 and 1.3.0beta16

See pluncker: http://plnkr.co/edit/7gs4uRP5PDHRKj6MLu2s

[Narretz]

That looks strange. ngIf really seems to swallow the other directive when replace=true.
But is there a special reason why you use two directive definitions? (One for the replace + template, one for link)

[godmar]

Yes. As you may imagine, my test case is a boiled-down example of what we're really facing. The use case is augmentation of an existing AngularJS application that is created by a third party. We rely on it heavily. Imagine that a third-party, let's say the vendor of a web application, creates the template-expanding directive. We don't control the vendor's code. The vendor provides the option to include custom JavaScript (for widgets, modifications, etc. etc.), JavaScript code which we do control.

Our goal is now to enhance/modify the existing UI, for which we use stacked directives that carry the same name as the vendor's original directives. The interaction of those directives with the original (vendor-provided ones) needs to be well-defined and should not depend on what is in the template, even if replace=true is used, IMO.

[lgalfaso]

this is not related to the fact that there are multiple directives that apply to the same element, in fact, if you move the link function to make it one directive you get the same result.
Anywhere that there is a directive with replace=true, then the content is delegated to this other directive. In this case, the directive ng-if is a directive with replace=true, so at link time you cannot modify the content any more. In a strict sense, you can still do it, but that would be a poor practice. What you should be doing is

• Adding content after the element
• Use another directive to add the extra content

[godmar]

So does this mean that directives that use 'replace=true' cannot be stacked?

In our actual use case, the vendor directive uses replace=true. We cannot add other directives in the way you suggest (unless we completely override the vendor directive, which would make stacking less practical).

[lgalfaso]

there are many things you can still do:

• Attach to some other element inside the template
• Add another directive that modifies the DOM on compile
• Override the template

Without some extra information, it is impossible to know what the best solution would be. Now, this is getting out of topic, so I think it is better to continue the conversation in StackOverflow