FWIW, I have long felt we made a fundamental error in making entityAspect a property. It should have been a getter method. Too late now though.

Thanks for the deets. I'll take a look at the code you linked

I hasten to add that there is an easy and performant way to detect changes ... listen for property changed, either on the entity itself or on the `EntityManager`.

That's where I'd go and then to see how to drive ng-firmly from that ... if that's possible.

Events always beat watches. The problem with events is setting them up. Breeze does that for free.

I will look at your links soon.

Thanks for the dialog.

Hi Ward! BartNet asked me to come on and explain why we're deep watching the model. Here's the code where that happens (for reference): https://github.com/formly-js/angular-formly/blob/master/src/directives/formly-form.js#L114

In prose, angular-formly allows you to dynamically alter the properties of fields. This feature is called expressionProperties (see this egghead.io lesson for more info https://egghead.io/lessons/angularjs-angular-formly-expressionproperties?pl=advanced-angular-forms-with-angular-formly). The expressionProperties are run when any of the model properties change. This is an extremely powerful feature of angular-formly. It also normally results in fewer watches because there's a single watch per form rather than a single watch per expression property.

Based on what you've said though, I don't see this change actually happening anytime soon... People may have to find a way around it...

this is the conversation on ng-formly: https://github.com/formly-js/angular-formly/issues/397

Hi Ward,

I'm using ng-formly (http://docs.angular-formly.com/) to render forms.
And it is ng-formly that is using 'watches' to monitor changes.
I will try to get 'Kent C. Dodds' into the conversation to discuss this topic.

For a test. I changed the 'entityAspect' to '$entityAspect' and it did solve the problem.

This will **not** happen for two reasons:

1. It would be a profoundly breaking change as `entityAspect` is one of the most widely used properties in the product.

1. **It wouldn't help**. The `entityAspect` is only one of many entity properties that result in circular references and stack overflows. Most navigation properties do it too.

1. The `ng.equal` "deep equality test" is inappropriate for breeze entity comparison as there are just too many values in a typical entity for this to perform well.

1. I don't understand why you'd want that anyway when object reference equality will do for most scenarios I can imagine. Remember that the entity object is mutated in place when breeze updates its values from, say, a re-query or a save.

I urge you to take a different approach to watching a collection of entities. I'd like to know what you're trying to accomplish.

Of course I could be missing something big. It would have to be gigantic for us to even consider such a change.