Angular: load environment properties before config/run - angularjs

Question

I'm developing a angular app, and this app has about a 10 configurable properties (depending on the environment and client).
I had those properties in json config files, but this is really troublesome: there must be specific builds per env/company. So I would like to retrieve those properties once from the backend on app load.
So in order to do this I created a Provider
var app = angular.module('myApp', [...]);
app.provider('environment', function() {
var self = this;
self.environment;
self.loadEnvironment = function (configuration, $http, $q) {
var def = $q.defer();
$http(...)
.success(function (data) {
self.environment = Environment.build(...);
def.resolve(self.environment);
}).error(function (err) {
...
});
return def.promise;
};
self.$get = function(configuration, $http, $q) {
if (!_.isUndefined(self.environment)) {
return $q.resolve(self.environment);
}
return self.loadEnvironment(configuration, $http, $q);
};
}
app.config(... 'environmentProvider', function(... environment) {
...
//The problem here is that I can't do environment.then(...) or something similar...
//Environment does exists though, with the available functions...
}
How to properly work with this Provider that executes a rest call to populate his environment variable?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This is an excelent scenario to explore angularjs features.
Assuming that you really need the environment data loaded before the app loads, you can use angular tools to load the environment and then declare a value or a constant to store your environment configs before the app bootstraps.
So, instead of using ng-app to start your app, you must use angular.bootstrap to bootstrap it manually.
Observations: You mustn't use ng-app once you are bootstrapping the app manually, otherwise your app will load with the angular default system without respecting your environment loading. Also, make sure to bootstrap your application after declare all module components; i.e. declare all controllers, servieces, directives, etc. so then, you call angular.bootstrap
The below code implements the solution described previously:
(function() {
var App = angular.module("myApp", []);
// it will return a promisse of the $http request
function loadEnvironment () {
// loading angular injector to retrieve the $http service
var ngInjector = angular.injector(["ng"]);
var $http = ngInjector.get("$http");
return $http.get("/environment-x.json").then(function(response) {
// it could be a value as well
App.constant("environment ", response.data);
}, function(err) {
console.error("Error loading the application environment.", err)
});
}
// manually bootstrap the angularjs app in the root document
function bootstrapApplication() {
angular.element(document).ready(function() {
angular.bootstrap(document, ["myApp"]);
});
}
// load the environment and declare it to the app
// so then bootstraps the app starting the application
loadEnvironment().then(bootstrapApplication);
}());