Angular doesn’t change the meaning of the onclick attribute; it adds the parallel ng-click attribute to take an Angular expression. onclick takes plain old JavaScript code even when you’re using Angular.
Practically speaking, suppose what you’re doing in a click handler is changing some variables in an Angular scope, or calling a function in an Angular scope that changes some variables.
To do that from JavaScript code (like what you would put in onclick) requires a bunch of steps
- get a reference to the scope
- assign the variable or call the function
- call
scope.$applyso that anything watching for updates to the variables that you changed gets notified
This looks like:
<a onclick="var $scope = angular.element(event.target).scope(); $scope.yourVar = 42; $scope.$apply()">Go</a>
and with ng-click and an Angular expression for the assignment, almost all of that is implicit:
<a ng-click="yourVar = 42">Go</a>