angular equals method fails because of "too much recursion"

Question

I have a javascript object graph that contains cyclical references. When I use this object in angular, firefox gives me the following error message (the "..." contains 100+ duplicates of the same line preceding and following it):

Error: too much recursion equals@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:995:1 
equals@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:997:15 
equals@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:997:15
...
equals@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:997:15 
equals@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:984:17 
equals@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:997:15 
$RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$digest@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:12491:1 
$RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$apply@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:12762:13 
done@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:8357:34 
completeRequest@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:8571:7 
createHttpBackend/</xhr.onreadystatechange@http://localhost:8080/ops/bower_components/angular/angular.js:8514:1

Is there a way to tell angular to consider objects equal if they match X levels deep? Or does angular just not work with cyclical references?

The Backstory (in case you wanted to know)

I was having trouble finding a solution in jackson which would not serialize objects that have already appeared on a particular traversal path. This seems like it should be pretty straight forward to me, but I guess the functionality doesn't exist. That's when I stumbled upon jsog in this answer which enabled me to transfer my object graph (w/ circular dependencies) over to javascript. I was very happy that jsog did this for me, but then I encountered the above error.

andersonbd1 · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-24 15:25:31Z

3

It turns out that angular does not support circular references in the equals method. I forked it, committed a fix, and submitted a pull request. Then I found out that similar fixes had already been considered, but rejected because of either performance issues or browser compatibility. For my project, I don't care about browser compatibility, so I'll be using my own patched version of angular to support circular references.

pull request discussion here: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/pull/9762#issuecomment-60282505

git fork here: https://github.com/andersonbd1/angular.js

answered Oct 24, 2014 at 15:25

andersonbd1

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3 Comments

jk7 Over a year ago

AngularJS does support cyclic references. Possibly this was added after you did your research. "During a property comparison, properties of function type and properties with names that begin with $ are ignored." -- from the angular.equals doc

zipper Over a year ago

@andersonbd1 you are exactly right. In my case, I need to ng-repeat over children of a tree node. since a child contains the reference to its parent, it broke the angularJs equals. I think this is a common scenario to support, so I scratched my version of equals[github.com/zipper01/modifiedNgEquals/tree/master]. Then when I look again I found you already made a patched version so maybe I wasted my time. But thanks for pointed this out -- l spent a day and half to detect the issue before I read your answer here.

zipper Over a year ago

@jk7 even if that is the case it is not for users but for themselves. Forcing a name convention does not make any sense. It can be easily supported [github.com/zipper01/modifiedNgEquals/tree/master] but they let it there as a potential bug; no idea why they made it that way.

Carlos Pliego · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-22 20:59:01Z

-1

AngularJs has a good interface for equals, I suggest taking a look: https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/function/angular.equals

angular.equals(o1, o2);

It does deep searches, however I am not sure if this can be modified Also here is something that describes the performance of angular.equals http://jsperf.com/angular-equals

answered Oct 22, 2014 at 20:59

Carlos Pliego

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