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up vote 16 down vote favorite
7

A newbie question :)

How do I create some sort of utils bundle that would be accessible from all my controllers? I have this route code in my main module:

'use strict';

/* App Module */

angular.module('lpConnect', []).
    config(['$routeProvider', function($routeProvider) {
    $routeProvider.
        when('/home', {template: 'views/home.html',   controller: HomeCtrl}).
        when('/admin', {template: 'views/admin.html',   controller: AdminCtrl}).
        when('/connect', {template: 'views/fb_connect.html',   controller: MainAppCtrl}).
        otherwise({redirectTo: '/connect'});
}]);

and I want a function that will be common to HomeCtrl,AdminCtrl,MainAppCtrl

How should I do it in AngularJS?

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1 Answer 1

up vote 27 down vote accepted

The way to define common code in angular is through Services.

You would define a new service like so : 

.factory('CommonCode', function ($window) {
        var root = {};
        root.show = function(msg){
            $window.alert(msg);
        };
        return root;
    });

In your controller you would inject this service..like so

function MainAppCtrl($scope,CommonCode)
{
     $scope.alerter = CommonCode;
     $scope.alerter.show("Hello World");
}

Just include CommonCode as an argument to your controller function.. Angular will take care of injecting it for you ( Read on Dependancy Injection ..to understand what is happening here. )

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3  
Anyone else find it.... odd that you define a service by calling the factory method? Seems like some naming improvements would go a long way to increasing approachability of the framework. –  bclinkinbeard Aug 13 '12 at 15:58
    
@bclinkinbeard exactly my thoughts as I'm wrapping my head around AngularJS. factory(), value(), constant(), and service() seem to be no more than shortcuts for specific cases of provide(), which is intended to be used for defining (providing) services. I guess the docs would benefit from a pull request that puts the above sentence in large letters somewhere. –  Anton Strogonoff Oct 20 '12 at 16:31
    
To be frank, when I first started this is what confused me. Factory() generally returns a singleton, as you can see, from the above example. A service() - returns a constructor. A value() and constant() as far as I can tell generally do the same thing. And all these are wrapper ( convenience ) over provide()... –  ganaraj Oct 23 '12 at 8:28
    
Is the $window variable essential here? –  Gnuey Oct 28 '13 at 17:52
    
It decouples your code from the global window object. So its much easier to test ( mock! ) . –  ganaraj Oct 29 '13 at 10:53

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