AngularJS event chaining in directives

AngularJS event chaining in directives

I am building a filtering component using AngularJS that needs to be
scalable across many applications and data sets. I've built a directive
that uses data from a JSON object and builds out the appropriate tables --
simple.
Next, I need to build a filtering system which filters data across these
tables based on parent/child relationships and selections from the parent
table. Since each table is built from the same directive how should I use
angular best practices to accomplish this? How would I be able to kick off
a filtering event in a child directive instance once its parent is done
filtering, and still keep my code simple and scalable?
I've started reading up on directive controllers and
directive-to-directive communication but this seems to only apply to
directives that inherit methods from other directives (not instances of
the same directive).
Any help would be great!
Thanks, Austin