As I understand it, when inside a factory I return an object that gets injected into a controller. When inside a service I am dealing with the object using this
There is also a way to return a constructor function so you can return newable classes in factories, like this:
function MyObjectWithParam($rootScope, name) {
this.$rootScope = $rootScope;
this.name = name;
}
MyObjectWithParam.prototype.getText = function () {
return this.name;
};
App.factory('MyObjectWithParam', function ($injector) {
return function(name) {
return $injector.instantiate(MyObjectWithParam,{ name: name });
};
});
So you can do this in a controller, which uses MyObjectWithParam:
var obj = new MyObjectWithParam("hello"),
See here the full example:
http://plnkr.co/edit/GKnhIN?p=preview
And here the google group pages, where it was discussed:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/angular/56sdORWEoqg/b8hdPskxZXsJ