Sharing data between directives

You can create a factory that you can pass to each directive or controller. That will make sure you only have one instance of the array at any given time. EDIT: The only gotcha here is to make sure you’re setting reference types and not primitive types on your directive scopes, or you’ll end up duplicating the values in each scope.

Here is an example on Plnkr.co

app.controller('MainCtrl', function($scope, dataService) {
  $scope.name="World";
  //set up the items.
  angular.copy([ { name: 'test'} , { name: 'foo' } ], dataService.items);
});

app.directive('dir1', function(dataService){
  return {
    restrict: 'E',
    template: '<h3>Directive 1</h3>' + 
    '<div ng-repeat="item in data.items">' + 
      '<input type="text" ng-model="item.name"/>' + 
    '</div>',
    link: function(scope, elem, attr) {
      scope.data = dataService;
    }
  };
});

app.directive('dir2', function(dataService){
  return {
    restrict: 'E',
    template: '<h3>Directive 2</h3>' + 
    '<div ng-repeat="item in data.items">' + 
      '<input type="text" ng-model="item.name"/>' + 
    '</div>',
    link: function(scope, elem, attr) {
      scope.data = dataService;
    }
  };
});

app.directive('dir3', function(dataService){
  return {
    restrict: 'E',
    template: '<h3>Directive 3</h3>' + 
    '<div ng-repeat="item in data.items">' + 
      '<input type="text" ng-model="item.name"/>' + 
    '</div>',
    link: function(scope, elem, attr) {
      scope.data = dataService;
    }
  };
});

app.factory('dataService', [function(){
  return { items: [] };
}]);

HTML

  <dir1></dir1>
  <dir2></dir2>
  <dir3></dir3>