Update: My original answer involved having the controller contain DOM-aware code, which breaks Angular conventions in favor of HTML. @dmackerman mentioned directives in a comment on my answer, and I completely missed that until just now. With that input, here's the right way to do this without breaking Angular or HTML conventions:
There's also a way to get both - grab the value of the element and use that to update the model in a directive:
<div ng-controller="Main">
<input type="text" id="rootFolder" ng-model="rootFolders" disabled="disabled" value="Bob" size="40" />
</div>
and then:
app.directive('input', ['$parse', function ($parse) {
return {
restrict: 'E',
require: '?ngModel',
link: function (scope, element, attrs) {
if(attrs.value) {
$parse(attrs.ngModel).assign(scope, attrs.value);
}
}
};
}]);
You can of course modify the above directive to do more with the value
attribute before setting the model to its value, including using $parse(attrs.value, scope)
to treat the value
attribute as an Angular expression (though I'd probably use a different [custom] attribute for that, personally, so the standard HTML attributes are consistently treated as constants).
Also, there is a similar question over at Making data templated in available to ng-model which may also be of interest.