Confused about Service vs Factory

Question

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

Answer 1

Here are some more examples of services vs factories which may be useful in seeing the difference between them. Basically, a service has "new ..." called on it, it is already instantiated. A factory is not instantiated automatically.

Basic Examples

Return a class object which has a single method

Here is a service that has a single method:

angular.service('Hello', function () {
  this.sayHello = function () { /* ... */ };
});

Here is a factory that returns an object with a method:

angular.factory('ClassFactory', function () {
  return {
    sayHello: function () { /* ... */ }
  };
});

Return a value

A factory that returns a list of numbers:

angular.factory('NumberListFactory', function () {
  return [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
});

console.log(NumberListFactory);

A service that returns a list of numbers:

angular.service('NumberLister', function () {
  this.numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
});

console.log(NumberLister.numbers);

The output in both cases is the same, the list of numbers.

Advanced Examples

"Class" variables using factories

In this example we define a CounterFactory, it increments or decrements a counter and you can get the current count or get how many CounterFactory objects have been created:

angular.factory('CounterFactory', function () {
  var number_of_counter_factories = 0; // class variable

  return function () {
    var count = 0; // instance variable
    number_of_counter_factories += 1; // increment the class variable

    // this method accesses the class variable
    this.getNumberOfCounterFactories = function () {
      return number_of_counter_factories;
    };

    this.inc = function () {
      count += 1;
    };
    this.dec = function () {
      count -= 1;
    };
    this.getCount = function () {
      return count;
    };
  }

})

We use the CounterFactory to create multiple counters. We can access the class variable to see how many counters were created:

var people_counter;
var places_counter;

people_counter = new CounterFactory();
console.log('people', people_counter.getCount());
people_counter.inc();
console.log('people', people_counter.getCount());

console.log('counters', people_counter.getNumberOfCounterFactories());

places_counter = new CounterFactory();
console.log('places', places_counter.getCount());

console.log('counters', people_counter.getNumberOfCounterFactories());
console.log('counters', places_counter.getNumberOfCounterFactories());

The output of this code is:

people 0
people 1
counters 1
places 0
counters 2
counters 2