AngularJS: How to run additional code after AngularJS has rendered a template?

First, the right place to mess with rendering are directives. My advice would be to wrap DOM manipulating jQuery plugins by directives like this one.

I had the same problem and came up with this snippet. It uses $watch and $evalAsync to ensure your code runs after directives like ng-repeat have been resolved and templates like {{ value }} got rendered.

app.directive('name', function() {
    return {
        link: function($scope, element, attrs) {
            // Trigger when number of children changes,
            // including by directives like ng-repeat
            var watch = $scope.$watch(function() {
                return element.children().length;
            }, function() {
                // Wait for templates to render
                $scope.$evalAsync(function() {
                    // Finally, directives are evaluated
                    // and templates are renderer here
                    var children = element.children();
                    console.log(children);
                });
            });
        },
    };
});

Hope this can help you prevent some struggle.

This post is old, but I change your code to:

scope.$watch("assignments", function (value) {//I change here
  var val = value || null;            
  if (val)
    element.dataTable({"bDestroy": true});
  });
}

see jsfiddle.

I hope it helps you