Customizing the template within a Directive

I have a form that is using markup from Bootstrap, like the following:

<form class="form-horizontal">
  <fieldset>
    <legend>Legend text</legend>
    <div class="control-group">
      <label class="control-label" for="nameInput">Name</label>
      <div class="controls">
        <input type="text" class="input-xlarge" id="nameInput">
        <p class="help-block">Supporting help text</p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </fieldset>
</form>

There's a lot of boilerplate code in there, that I'd like to reduce to a new directive - form-input, like follows:

<form-input label="Name" form-id="nameInput"></form-input>

generates:

   <div class="control-group">
      <label class="control-label" for="nameInput">Name</label>
      <div class="controls">
        <input type="text" class="input-xlarge" id="nameInput">
      </div>
    </div>

I have this much working via a simple template.

angular.module('formComponents', [])
    .directive('formInput', function() {
        return {
            restrict: 'E',
            scope: {
                label: 'bind',
                formId: 'bind'
            },
            template:   '<div class="control-group">' +
                            '<label class="control-label" for="{{formId}}">{{label}}</label>' +
                            '<div class="controls">' +
                                '<input type="text" class="input-xlarge" id="{{formId}}" name="{{formId}}">' +
                            '</div>' +
                        '</div>'

        }
    })

However it's when I come to add in more advanced functionality that I'm getting stuck.

How can I support default values in the template?

I'd like to expose the "type" parameter as an optional attribute on my directive, eg:

<form-input label="Password" form-id="password" type="password"/></form-input>
<form-input label="Email address" form-id="emailAddress" type="email" /></form-input>

However, if nothing is specified, I'd like to default to "text". How can I support this?

How can I customize the template based on the presence / absence of attributes?

I'd also like to be able to support the "required" attribute, if it's present. Eg:

<form-input label="Email address" form-id="emailAddress" type="email" required/></form-input>

If required is present in the directive, I'd like to add it to the generated <input /> in the output, and ignore it otherwise. I'm not sure how to achieve this.

I suspect these requirements may have moved beyond a simple template, and have to start using the pre-compile phases, but I'm at a loss where to start.

angular.module('formComponents', [])
  .directive('formInput', function() {
    return {
        restrict: 'E',
        compile: function(element, attrs) {
            var type = attrs.type || 'text';
            var required = attrs.hasOwnProperty('required') ? "required='required'" : "";
            var htmlText = '<div class="control-group">' +
                '<label class="control-label" for="' + attrs.formId + '">' + attrs.label + '</label>' +
                    '<div class="controls">' +
                    '<input type="' + type + '" class="input-xlarge" id="' + attrs.formId + '" name="' + attrs.formId + '" ' + required + '>' +
                    '</div>' +
                '</div>';
            element.replaceWith(htmlText);
        }
    };
})

Tried to use the solution proposed by Misko, but in my situation, some attributes, which needed to be merged into my template html, were themselves directives.

Unfortunately, not all of the directives referenced by the resulting template did work correctly. I did not have enough time to dive into angular code and find out the root cause, but found a workaround, which could potentially be helpful.

The solution was to move the code, which creates the template html, from compile to a template function. Example based on code from above:

    angular.module('formComponents', [])
  .directive('formInput', function() {
    return {
        restrict: 'E',
        template: function(element, attrs) {
           var type = attrs.type || 'text';
            var required = attrs.hasOwnProperty('required') ? "required='required'" : "";
            var htmlText = '<div class="control-group">' +
                '<label class="control-label" for="' + attrs.formId + '">' + attrs.label + '</label>' +
                    '<div class="controls">' +
                    '<input type="' + type + '" class="input-xlarge" id="' + attrs.formId + '" name="' + attrs.formId + '" ' + required + '>' +
                    '</div>' +
                '</div>';
             return htmlText;
        }
        compile: function(element, attrs)
        {
           //do whatever else is necessary
        }
    }
})

The above answers unfortunately don't quite work. In particular, the compile stage does not have access to scope, so you can't customize the field based on dynamic attributes. Using the linking stage seems to offer the most flexibility (in terms of asynchronously creating dom, etc.) The below approach addresses that:

<!-- Usage: -->
<form>
  <form-field ng-model="formModel[field.attr]" field="field" ng-repeat="field in fields">
</form>

// directive
angular.module('app')
.directive('formField', function($compile, $parse) {
  return { 
    restrict: 'E', 
    compile: function(element, attrs) {
      var fieldGetter = $parse(attrs.field);

      return function (scope, element, attrs) {
        var template, field, id;
        field = fieldGetter(scope);
        template = '..your dom structure here...'
        element.replaceWith($compile(template)(scope));
      }
    }
  }
})

I've created a gist with more complete code and a writeup of the approach.

Here's what I ended up using.

I'm very new to AngularJS, so would love to see better / alternative solutions.

angular.module('formComponents', [])
    .directive('formInput', function() {
        return {
            restrict: 'E',
            scope: {},
            link: function(scope, element, attrs)
            {
                var type = attrs.type || 'text';
                var required = attrs.hasOwnProperty('required') ? "required='required'" : "";
                var htmlText = '<div class="control-group">' +
                    '<label class="control-label" for="' + attrs.formId + '">' + attrs.label + '</label>' +
                        '<div class="controls">' +
                        '<input type="' + type + '" class="input-xlarge" id="' + attrs.formId + '" name="' + attrs.formId + '" ' + required + '>' +
                        '</div>' +
                    '</div>';
                element.html(htmlText);
            }
        }
    })

Example usage:

<form-input label="Application Name" form-id="appName" required/></form-input>
<form-input type="email" label="Email address" form-id="emailAddress" required/></form-input>
<form-input type="password" label="Password" form-id="password" /></form-input>