Looking over these solutions, the one provided by Al Johri above is the closest to my needs, but his directive was a little less programmable then I wanted. Here is my version of his solutions:
angular.module("app", [])
.directive("dynamicFormName", function() {
return {
restrict: "A",
priority: 0,
require: ["form"],
compile: function() {
return {
pre: function preLink(scope, iElement, iAttrs, ctrls) {
var name = "field" + scope.$index;
if (iAttrs.dnfnNameExpression) {
name = scope.$eval(iAttrs.dnfnNameExpression);
}
var parentForm = iElement.parent().controller("form");
if (parentForm) {
var formCtrl = ctrls[0];
delete parentForm[formCtrl.$name];
formCtrl.$name = name;
parentForm[formCtrl.$name] = formCtrl;
}
}
}
}
};
});
This solution lets you just pass a name generator expression to the directive and avoids the lock down to pattern substitution he was using.
I also had trouble initially with this solution since it didn't show an example of using it in markup, so here is how I used it.
<form name="theForm">
<div ng-repeat="field in fields">
<input type="number" ng-form name="theInput{{field.id}}" ng-model="field.value" dynamic-form-name dnfn-name-expression="'theInput' + field.id">
</div>
</form>
I have a more complete working example on github.