The documentation talks about opening the datepicker programmatically, but it doesn't give an easy way to get a reference to a datepicker that's already bound to an element.
In a project I'm working on I have a datepicker directive that wraps almost exactly the HTML you have into a myDatepicker
directive. Inside that directive the ng-click
method bound to the <button>
element is essentially:
scope.openDatepicker = function() {
element.children('input').focus();
}
which worked well enough for me.
Since angular-strap has been rewritten to get rid of any bootstrap.js dependencies a lot of bugs and oddities have been introduced. I'm working on upgrading my project's codebase to the newer version of angular-strap, and I feel like going with UI Bootstrap would have been a better choice, since its codebase is a bit more mature.