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How to share data between controllers in AngularJS

Dhananjay Kumar / Monday, May 4, 2015

In my AngularJS classes, I often get asked, “How do I share data between the controllers in AngularJS?” On the Internet, there are many solutions suggested. However, I prefer to share data using the Shared Data Service method, and that’s what we’re going to explore in this post.

To start with, let’s suppose that we want to share a Product object between the controllers. Here I have created an AngularJS service named SharedDataService as shown in the snippet below:

myApp.service('SharedDataService', function () {
     var Product = {
        name: '',
        price: ''
    };
    return Product;
});

Next let’s go ahead and create two different controllers using SharedDataService. In the controllers, we are using the service created in the previous step. Controllers can be created as shown below:

var myApp = angular.module("myApp", ['CalService']);
 
myApp.controller("DataController1", ['$scope', 'SharedDataService',

    function ($scope, SharedDataService) {

    $scope.Product = SharedDataService;

 

    }]);

 
myApp.controller("DataController2", ['$scope', 'SharedDataService',

    function ($scope, SharedDataService) {

    $scope.Product = SharedDataService;

 

}]);

On the view we can simply use the controllers as shown in the listing below:

<div ng-controller="DataController1">
            <h2>In Controller 1h2>
            <input type="text" ng-model="Product.name" /> <br/>
            <input type="text" ng-model="Product.price" />
            <h3>Product {{Product.name}} costs {{Product.price}}  h3>
        div>
        <hr/>
        <div ng-controller="DataController2">
            <h2>In Controller 2h2>
            <h3>Product {{Product.name}} costs {{Product.price}}  h3>
        div>

Now we can share the data between the controllers. As you can see, the name and price of the product is being set in the DataController1, and we are fetching the data in the DataController2.

Do you have any better options that you use to share data? Or perhaps you have a complex scenario which may be not be solved by the above approach. If so, let me know! Tell me about it in the comments below.