Why AngularJS services aren't available in configuration blocks

This post explains why services aren’t available in configuration blocks.

AngularJS has a concept of $injector which has a function called invoke().

AngularJS has two injectors. They are:

  • instanceInjector
  • providerInjector

When we say $injector, most of the times we mean instanceInjector. You can read more about injectors in our last post.

instanceInjector, or what we generally call $injector, can provide access to a service in either of the following ways:

  • instantiate the service. Once instantiated instanceInjector caches the service
  • get the service from cache if its alreay in cache

At low level, Controller or Service code is executed by $injector.invoke(). And this $injector knows a way to reach the services in one of the two ways mentioned above.

During configuration phase, i.e when configuration block is executed, $injector i.e instanceInjector isn’t available. So instanceInjector cache isn’t available too and so services aren’t accessible in configuration blocks.

Try to access a service in configuration block and it will fail:

angular.module("core", []);
angular
	.module("core")
	.service("ProfileService", function () {
		var profile = {'name': 'hardcoded name'};
		return {
			'profile': profile;
		}
	});

Try to access this service in config block

angular
	.module("core")
	.config(["ProfileService", function (ProfileService) {
	}]);

This failed because $injector isn’t available when config block executed.

Also there shouldn’t be a need to access services in configuration blocks. Configuration blocks are meant to configure things, eg: to configure a constant which will be used throughout the angular app. And services are meant to keep business logic. There shouldn’t be need to use business logic during configuration phase.

Thank you for reading the Agiliq blog. This article was written by Akshar on Apr 30, 2017 in angularjs .

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