Here's a Plunker with everything working together. I have separated all of the pieces into individual JS files, as it was getting unruly:

Plunker

Search

The built in filter will only return results from the current view data that the ng-repeat is displaying. Because you're not loading all of the data into the view at once, you'll have to create your own search functionality.

In the demo, click the search icon to show the search box, then type your search value and press the ENTER key or click the search button to return the results.

Since you want to check whether the user pressed ENTER you have to pass both the event and the querystring to the function, so you can check for the enter keycode. The function should also run when someone clicks or taps the search button. I set ng-model="query" on the input, so query is the reference in the view. Therefore, you'll add ng-click="searchInvoices($event, query)" to your search button, and ng-keyup="searchInvoices($event, query)" to the input. And, finally, to make it easy to clear the input field, add a button that displays when the input is not empty with ng-show="query" and attach a click event with ng-click="query=null; resetGrid()".

Add the searchInvoices function to your controller. It will only run the search if either the query is empty (because you need to reset the view if the person uses the backspace key to empty the input) OR if the user pressed ENTER OR if the event was a click event in case the user clicks the search button. The inner if statement, prevents the search from running if the query is empty and just resets the view. If the query is not empty, against the total dataset and builds an array of matching results, which is used to update the view.

The last line sets the scroll position to the top of the scrollview container. This makes sure that the user sees the results without having to click somewhere in the scrollview container. Make sure you inject the $ionicScrollDelegate into your controller for this to work and set delegate-handle="invoicegrid" on your ion-scroll directive.

  $scope.searchInvoices = function(evt, queryval) {
    if (queryval.length === 0 || evt.keyCode === 13 || evt.type === 'click') {
      if (queryval.length === 0) {
        $scope.invoice_records = $scope.total_invoice_records;
      } else {
        var recordset = $scope.total_invoice_records;
        results = [];
        var recordsetLength = recordset.length;
        var searchVal = queryval.toLowerCase();
        var i, j;
        
        for (i = 0; i < recordsetLength; i++) {
          var record = recordset[i].columns;
  
          for (j = 0; j < record.length; j++) {
            var invoice = record[j].value.toLowerCase();
            if (invoice.indexOf(searchVal) >= 0) {
              results.push(recordset[i]);
            }
          }
        }
        $scope.invoice_records = results;
        $ionicScrollDelegate.$getByHandle('invoicegrid').scrollTop();
      }
    }
  };

Lastly, you need to modify the loadMore() function that is used by the infinite scroll directive, so that it doesn't try to load additional data when scrolling through the search results. To do this, you can just pass the query into loadMore on the directive like: on-infinite="loadMore(query)", then in your function, you can just run the broadcast event when the query exists. Also, removing the ngIf will ensure that the list remains dynamic.

  $scope.loadMore = function(query) {
    if (query || counter >= $scope.total_invoice_records.length) {
      $scope.$broadcast('scroll.infiniteScrollComplete');
    } else {
      $scope.counter = $scope.counter + showitems;
      $scope.$broadcast('scroll.infiniteScrollComplete');
    }
  };