Some notes about $watch, $apply, $digest in AngularJS AngularJS 20.07.2015

In addition to storing data, scopes have three important functions that are fundamental to the way data binding works. These functions are called $watch, $apply, and $digest.

$watch

$watch makes up one side of two-way data binding: it enables you to set a callback function to be called whenever the value of a given expression changes. The callback function is often referred to as a watcher. A simple usage of $watch is to update a weather variable every time the user changes city:

$scope.$watch('city', function(value) {
    $http.get('/remote/url/').success(function(data){
        $scope.weather = data.temp;
    })
});

Internally, $watch is a trivial function. Each scope maintains a list of watchers, called $scope.$$watchers.$watch simply adds a new watcher, which includes some internal bookkeeping to keep track of the last computed value of the expression.

$apply

$apply makes up the other half of two-way data binding: it informs AngularJS that something has changed and the values of $watch expressions should be recomputed. You usually won’t have to call $apply yourself, because AngularJS’s built-in directives (such as ngClick) and services (such as $timeout) call $apply for you.

You’re most likely to run into $apply in the context of custom event handlers. When an event occurs, such as a user clicking a button, or an outstanding HTTP request has completed, AngularJS needs to be informed that the model may have changed. Directives like ngClick and ngDblclick call $apply internally for this reason.

// some changes ...
$scope.weather = temp;
$scope.$apply();

$digest

$digest is the magic glue function that ties together $watch and $apply. You would be hard-pressed to find an example where you need to interface with $digest directly rather than through $watch and ``$apply.

At a high level, $digest evaluates all the $watch expressions in a scope, as well as the scope’s children, and fires the watcher callback on any that have changed. This process may seem simple, but there’s a subtle difficulty: a watcher can change the scope, which in turn means that there may be other watchers that need to be informed of changes.