fix(form): set $submitted to true on child forms when parent is submitted - #11023

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CLAs look good, thanks!

+1

@Narretz what is the status of this issue? Is there anything I can do to move this along?

👍 any chance this could be made available in 1.3.x? Or at least 1.4.x (rather than just 1.5.x) :-)

👍

1.4.x yes, 1.3.x no. I just wonder if it can be considered a breaking change

One possible middle ground would be exposing the array of controls. That way they can be iterated over in a third party plugin.

@gkalpak I looked into the the docs for the similar methods on a FormController. The current documentation for $setSubmitted says nothing about propagating. I think there is some confusion, at least for me, around the reasoning for why each method propagates the way it does.

$setDirty - goes up
$setSubmitted - goes up
$setPristine - goes down
$setUntouched - goes down

To me $setDirty makes sense to propagate up because if one child control or form is dirty then the parents are too. $setSubmitted has a similar use case as to $setPristine and $setUntouched because often times a form is made up of many nested forms which submit as one.

One alternative to making this change as I have mentioned above is to expose the controls array as $controls so that consumers of this api can write directives that are able to safely iterate over a FormController's child controls. Such a change could be leveraged by formly for example.

@ckniffen, I wonder myself why $setSubmitted propagates the way it does (I don't find it intuitive, but I rarely make use of it anyway). I would be open to changing its behaviour, but it will be a breaking change so it has to be made before 1.5.0 (if at all).
Feel free to open an issue about it and see what people think.

Exposing $controls should definitely be helpful in certain scenarios, but could also be abused leading to weird and hard to debug bugs. I'm undecided about this, but would happily review a PR :)

There's no (big) rush to get this in. We'll have a few 1.5.0-beta.x releases before the 1.5.0 release (which should be the first not to contain any breaking changes).

will we be able to merge this before Obama leaves office?

Let's continue discussion in #15778. I'm confident we'll resolve this before Trump is impeached.