angularjs IE9 scope variable becomes undefined

Question

I'm encountering a weird issue on IE9. What I'm trying to do is opening a popup window from my page and attaching the scope of the page to the window object like:

angularApp.controller('ParentCtrl', function($scope, $window) {
    $window.parentScope = $scope;
    $window.open(url, popupName, params);
});

In my popup/child controller I'm using some property from the parent scope to populate data. Then in my popup page I have some controls which lets a user to pick certain persons from a multi select box. After the user clicks on Assign persons from the popup page I'm calling a method in my parent page like:

childApp.controller('ChildCtrl', function($scope, $window) {
    $window.opener.parentScope.updatePersons($scope.personInfo);
}

The method updatePersons is defined in the ParentCtrl as:

$scope.updatePersons = function(personInfo){
    $scope.$apply(function() {
        $scope.personInfo = personInfo;
    });
};

Until now everything works fine and the updated personInfo array is copied from popup to the parent page. Now when I again open the popup page from a button on the parent page the value of $scope.personInfo in ParentCtrl mysteriously gets set to undefined.

The personInfo array on the Parent page is used in a ng-repeat to show a tabular list of persons with their attributes and in IE9 I see undefined in all the columns of the table.

Apparently, Safari, Firefox and Chrome all work flawlessly and don't set the value of this scope variable to undefined when the popup page is clicked again. I've tried looking for a solution to this problem but have failed. I've put id="ng-app" at the root of my application and followed some IE caveats mentioned on angularJs project page but w/o any success. I would really appreciate any help from the community as it's a show stopper for my application.

I created a plunker to demo what I'm trying to achieve. Somehow the child page doesn't show parent scope values and the child can't update parent scope but that's working in my application.

http://plnkr.co/edit/E5pzzYOCMXHTK1huCAF5?p=preview

Thanks in advance for the help!

Answer 1

The plnkr example wasn't working for me in Chrome or IE.

It, for some reason, was trying to put duplicate values into the repeater. Tracking the repeat items by index fixed the issues I had with the example.

<div ng-repeat="person in personInfo track by $index">

Edit: To clarify - the plnkr worked in both Chrome and an emulated IE9 (IE11 emulating IE9) session after adding the track by.

Answer 2

I ended up solving the issue by using angular.copy to send data from parent to popup and then while updating personInfo from popup to parent. It worked to some extent so much so that the personInfo object wasn't getting set to undefined when i clicked on the popup again.

But I encountered another problem when I was receiving the updated data from popup to parent. My personInfo array had 2 nested JS arrays within it and when I was receiving the array from popup everything was fine but when I assigned it to my parent scope using $scope.personInfo = angular.copy(personInfo) the two nested JS arrays within $scope.personInfo converted to JS objects and length method didn't work on them.

The only way I could solve this was to iterate over each person object and then check if any of the arrays had length property undefined and then use jQuery's map function to convert those objects back into JS arrays. It's a silly hack but if anyone knows why is it happening on IE and what's the best angular way to do it that would be awesome!

I still don't get it why IE is treating the array differently when all other browsers seem to work fine. Also, why do I have to use angular.copy everywhere to make IE happy!!!

Thanks!