Often components I was reusing everywhere.

I often had to show on the screen large amount of informations, like tables, graphs or other heavyweight data. Using AngularJS, if I used the native and quick data-binding notation, I would very quickly overload the page with $watches. The AngularJS devs suggest not more than 2000 watches per page before you start to see performance decreases.

2000 is a lot of moving parts, and if you have 2000 dynamically bound data components in one page, you're most probably overloading your user's brain. This doesn't mean you can't have 2000 data elements on a page. For example, if you have a grid that shows small numbers in an Excel-like fashion, especially if each cell has two bindings or more (with a title attribute with bound information, etc..), you can easily hit that 2000 $watch cap (not that Angular will prevent you from doing it, it's just bad practice). But most of the time, all that information displayed on a screen is not going to change, or not all at the same time. You probably won't have 2000 cells with data flowing through. And even then, if you had 2000 cells with data flowing and changing in real-time, it would probably be a bad user experience (who can grasp the meaning of all those numbers flowing ?).

Ssssoo, long story short, I wanted bindings that would work the same as native bindings, but that wouldn't trigger $watches. That would be $interpolated the first time, and would never move. For that I wrote those simple set-... directives.

There is:

• set-title, which sets the title attribute once and for all

• set-href, sets the href attribute

• set-text, which sets the .text() content (using jQuery)

• set-html, which sets the .html() content (using jQuery again)

• set-class, which adds the class returned by the expression (using jQ's .addClass())

• set-if, which renders the content only if its evaluated expression is truthy. It is different from ng-show/ng-hide as the contents of the element will not be added to the DOM. It is also different from angular-ui's ui-if directive, as it is only evaluated once and does not set a $watch.