I stumbled upon a different solution outlined below.
Initially, I encapsulated the HTML of the fields causing Angular exceptions inside an NG-REPEAT code block. Then, in my Angular JavaScript code, I populated the list as soon as the interface was ready to be constructed.
Here is my HTML before making the adjustments:
<div class="form-group" layout="row" flex>
<md-input-container layout="column" flex>
<label>Field Name</label>
<md-select ng-model="service.selectedChart.serieField">
<md-option ng-repeat="column in columns" ng-value="column.columnName">
{{column.columnName}}
</md-option>
</md-select>
</md-input-container>
</div>
HTML after the modifications:
<div ng-repeat="control in controls">
<div class="form-group" layout="row" flex>
<md-input-container layout="column" flex>
<label>Field Name</label>
<md-select ng-model="service.selectedChart.serieField">
<md-option ng-repeat="column in columns" ng-value="column.columnName">
{{column.columnName}}
</md-option>
</md-select>
</md-input-container>
</div>
</div>
In my JavaScript code, before populating the models for displaying options in my md-select, I initialized my NG-REPEAT model with an empty Array like so:
$scope.controls = [];
Once all the data was prepared for display, I simply added a new item to my array using this command.
$scope.controls = [{}];
I implemented this approach in three places within my application and it functioned smoothly. These fields were part of forms embedded in $mdDialog.