AngularJS : Initialize service with asynchronous data

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have an AngularJS service that I want to initialize with some asynchronous data. Something like this:

myModule.service('MyService', function($http) {
    var myData = null;

    $http.get('data.json').success(function (data) {
        myData = data;
    });

    return {
        setData: function (data) {
            myData = data;
        },
        doStuff: function () {
            return myData.getSomeData();
        }
    };
});

Obviously this won't work because if something tries to call doStuff() before myData gets back I will get a null pointer exception. As far as I can tell from reading some of the other questions asked hereand here I have a few options, but none of them seem very clean (perhaps I am missing something):

Setup Service with "run"

When setting up my app do this:

myApp.run(function ($http, MyService) {
    $http.get('data.json').success(function (data) {
        MyService.setData(data);
    });
});

Then my service would look like this:

myModule.service('MyService', function() {
    var myData = null;
    return {
        setData: function (data) {
            myData = data;
        },
        doStuff: function () {
            return myData.getSomeData();
        }
    };
});

This works some of the time but if the asynchronous data happens to take longer than it takes for everything to get initialized I get a null pointer exception when I call doStuff()

Use promise objects

This would probably work. The only downside it everywhere I call MyService I will have to know that doStuff() returns a promise and all the code will have to us then to interact with the promise. I would rather just wait until myData is back before loading the my application.

Manual Bootstrap

angular.element(document).ready(function() {
    $.getJSON("data.json", function (data) {
       // can't initialize the data here because the service doesn't exist yet
       angular.bootstrap(document);
       // too late to initialize here because something may have already
       // tried to call doStuff() and would have got a null pointer exception
    });
});

Global Javascript Var I could send my JSON directly to a global Javascript variable:

HTML:

 type="text/javascript" src="data.js">

data.js:

var dataForMyService = { 
// myData here
};

Then it would be available when initializing MyService:

                                                    

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