I'm using the built-in Angular filter OrderBy to my items by date and it works as expected in the DOM but I thought it would update the array itself so I can work with the new order of the items.
Anyone have any ideas how to achieve this?
Thanks.
P.S. I'm using AngularJS 1.3.14 if that changes anything.
The filter returns a sorted copy of the array, so you could just assign it to your scope and hold a reference of the sorted array.
You would inject the $filter service in your controller and then use it programatically like this:
var orderBy = $filter('orderBy');
$scope.array = orderBy(unsortedArray, expression);
More about this filter can be found here.
Of course, if your sorting expression is dynamic, then you will have to update the reference of the array every time it changes, which is not always ideal, but is absolutely viable with smaller amounts of data.
You should re-order your array from your controller before you bind it to the DOM. This is also more performant as Angular doesn't need to recompute the order on each digest cycle.
$scope.myOrderedArray = order( $scope.myArray );
And in the DOM
<div ng-repeat="item in myOrderedArray"> ... </div>
