You generally don't want your directives knowing anything about your controller, so the best(Angular) way of communicating between controllers and directives is through bi-directional bindings.
In your situation, I think best practice, again IMO, would be to create a directive for the button -- not the input. You'd tell the button which "input" (by id) to monitor. Something like:
<input id="input-{{item.id}}" type="text" ng-model="currMessage" />
<button class="btnMessage" ng-click="addMessage(currMessage, item)" default-input="input-{{item.id}}">Add</button>
ETA: Here's what the directive would end up looking like
http://plnkr.co/edit/HhEAUUq0IZvzblbRksBH?p=preview
myApp.directive('defaultInput', function () {
return {
restrict:'A',
link: function(scope, element, attrs) {
attrs.$observe('defaultInput', function(value) {
var inputElement = angular.element(document).find('#' + value);
inputElement.bind('keydown', function(e) {
if (e.keyCode == 13) {
element.click();
}
});
});
}
};
});
It could get tricky because the $observe
callback will fire every time your controller's scope.items
changes, so you'd need to somehow unbind and rebind (I know you're using jQuery, but I'm not seeing angular.unbind
in the docs).
Another option, if you wanted to stick closer to your original approach:
http://plnkr.co/edit/3X3usJJpaCccRTtJeYPF?p=preview
HTML
<input id="input-{{item.id}}" type="text" ng-model="currMessage" enter-fires-next-button />
JavaScript
myApp.directive('enterFiresNextButton', function() {
return function(scope, element, attrs){
element.on('keydown', function(e){
if(e.keyCode == 13) {
element.next('button').click();
}
});
}
});