Service

John Papa refers to services as Singletons, which means they should only be used for application information that has a single instance. Examples of this would include the current user, the application’s connection state, or the current library of localization messages.

Conventions

• Services should always return an object
• Services shouldn’t have their state changed through properties, only method calls

Naming Convention

nameOfServiceService

Always lowercase camelCase the name of the object. Append ‘Service’ to the end of the service name so developers will know the object is a service, and changes will be persisted to other controllers.

Unit Testing Conventions

• Keep $httpBackend mock statements close to the specific places they are used (unless the statement is reusable)
• Use Jasmine’s spyOn method to mock the methods of other objects that are used
• In some cases mocking an entire AngularJS Service, or a constant, will be required. This is possible by using AngularJS’s $provide object within a beforeEach block. This would look like

beforeEach(module($provide){
    // mock out a tape recorder service, which is used else where
    tape = jasmine.createSpyObj('tape', ['play', 'pause', 'stop', 'rewind']);

    // overwrite an existing service
    $provide.service('TapeRecorderService', function(){
        return tape;
    });
});