Angular reload embedded controller

Question

I have a controller embedded using the ng-controller tag and it works fine but i've also got an external controller who needs to call one function of this controller:

<div ng-controller='NavigationController'>
    <!-- some html-->
</div>

And the controller

app.controller('NavigationController', function ($scope) {
  $scope.downloadItems = function(value) {
    //do something
  }
})

Now I want to trigger The downloadItems method from an other controller.

And I can't find it anywhere how this should be done?

Answer 1

I'm just learning Angular.js myself, but I'm pretty sure that if you want to reuse logic like this, you should put it into a service. (In fact, it's probably a good idea to put that sort of work into a service no matter what, so that is easy to separate from the controller for testing and reuse.)

app.factory("NavigationService", function() {
    return {
        downloadItems: function(value) { /* do something */ }
    }
});

app.controller("NavigationController", ["$scope", "NavigationService", function($scope, NavigationService) {
    $scope.downloadItems = function(value) {
        NavigationService.downloadItems(value);
    }
}]);

app.controller("OtherController", ["$scope", "NavigationService", function($scope, NavigationService) {
    ...
    NavigationService.downloadItems(value);
    ...
}]);

Now it's easy to test the download process outside the controller, and it's easy to mock the downloadItems function to test your controllers.