Not able to annotate directive controller dependency injections

(function() {
    'use strict';

    angular
        .module('app.widgets')
        .directive('directiveName', directiveName);

    function directiveName(someService) { //This is working
        return {
            controller: function(anotherService) { //No annotations generated for this one
        }
     }
   }

[dave-newson]

Just to necro this issue again, I’m here also because of this slight discrepancy between ng-annotate behaviour and the John Papa style guide, too.

Because I wasted 45 minutes on this, here’s a recap for anyone else (and google):

The Angular exception raised takes this form:

Error: [$injector:unpr] Unknown provider: iProvider <- i

Because the minifier has minified the arguments on the Controller function, but ng-annotate couldn’t identify the Directive’s controller as a controller and thus failed to generate the $inject call.

The difference, as pointed out by @olov, is in returning the directive definition rather than setting it on an object and then returning:

Does Not Work

        var directive = {
            restrict: 'EA',
            controller: MyDirectiveController,
        };
        return directive;

        function MyDirectiveController($scope) {
            $scope.someVar = "Hello World";
        }

Does Work

        return {
            restrict: 'EA',
            controller: MyDirectiveController,
        };

        function MyDirectiveController($scope) {
            $scope.someVar = "Hello World";
        }

It’s a minor annoyance with a simple workaround, but as the Angular errors for minified controller arguments are so completely useless (and this is why we use ng-annotate) it’s quite the time waster when you bump into it.

Citing @bartvanderwal comment about John Papa’s guide being endorsed by the Angular team, it would be great if something could be done to support this in the future.

This was confirmed using gulp-ng-annotate 2.0.0 with ng-annotate 1.2.1 under the hood.

[levin81]

Thanks, I changed it and it worked. Could this be supported? As this form is recommended both in https://github.com/johnpapa/angular-styleguide#directives and in https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/service/$compile