Pass existing injector into bootstrap function?

[bcherny]

I have a scenario where I declare a module, bootstrap it, then declare a 2nd module, and bootstrap the 2nd module. My constraint is that the 1st module's injector must be created before the 2nd module is declared.

However, because I bootstrap twice, I end up with 2 injectors. What do you guys think of allowing an optional injector property on the config object passed into bootstrap(), which can be used to allow reusing an existing injector instead of creating a new one when bootstrapping an app.

If that sounds reasonable, I would be happy to put up a PR.

Thanks!

[Narretz]

I personally think that adds a new option without a strong / frequent use case. Why do you need this setup with the different modules? And do you use a wrokaround right now?

[bcherny]

Agreed - it's an exotic use case, but without it I can't implement what I need.

It's for https://github.com/bcherny/ngimport. The idea is to make all built in services ($http, $log, etc.) importable (eg. import {$http} from 'ngimport'). The code works by retrieving these services from the $injector, then re-exporting them via regular exports.

In order for services imported from ngimport to be defined, the injector must be created already, which means the app must be bootstrapped already.

There are 2 ways out:

1. Services imported from ngimport are undefined until you bootstrap your app
2. Ngimport self-bootstraps, and exports an injector that you can pass into your own bootstrap function

Is there some other way to implement this?

[gkalpak]

You might be able to hack around it by monkey-patching $provide and/or $injector to return the instances created in another injector. In any case, note that instantiating providers or services may have side-effects. So the app may behave differently with/without ngimport if you eagerly instantiate some providers/services that might not be necessary.