private angular service or controller

Question

I have an angular module that contains some 'private' services. Those private services are only needed by other services in the same module and it makes sense to expose them for testing. But I don't want other modules to use this services.

Is there any possibility to mark such services 'private'? Is there at least a convention to name this services so that others recognize them as private?

Answer 1

If the only reason you need these "classes" to be angular Services is to have their dependencies injected painlessly, you could use $injector.instantiate to instantiate them without registering them as services.

Sample Code:

var PrivateClass = (function () {
    function PrivateClass($log) {
        this.hello = function () { $log.debug("Hello World!");}
    }
    PrivateClass.$inject = ["$log"];
    return PrivateClass;
})();

angular.module('TestApp', []).run(['$injector', function ($injector) {
    var p = $injector.instantiate(PrivateClass);
    p.hello();
}]);

You would use $injector.instantiate(PrivateClass) in the constructor (or anywhere) within the services that need it, to create an instance of the PrivateClass. If you need PrivateClass to behave like a singleton (like a real angular service), you could use an accessor class that instantiate it once and returns its reference to callers.

The advantage of this is that you need not pollute the instantiating service's (in this case the function passed to angular.run), dependency array with dependencies that are only needed so they could be passed on to the PrivateClass ($log in this case).

I noticed that this is an year old question but, I found this while looking for a way to achieve exactly the above and ultimately solved it using this approach.