Call method in directive controller from other controller

Question

This is an interesting question, and I started thinking about how I would implement something like this.

I came up with this (fiddle);

Basically, instead of trying to call a directive from a controller, I created a module to house all the popdown logic:

var PopdownModule = angular.module('Popdown', []);

I put two things in the module, a factory for the API which can be injected anywhere, and the directive for defining the behavior of the actual popdown element:

The factory just defines a couple of functions success and error and keeps track of a couple of variables:

PopdownModule.factory('PopdownAPI', function() {
    return {
        status: null,
        message: null,
        success: function(msg) {
            this.status="success";
            this.message = msg;
        },
        error: function(msg) {
            this.status="error";
            this.message = msg;
        },
        clear: function() {
            this.status = null;
            this.message = null;
        }
    }
});

The directive gets the API injected into its controller, and watches the api for changes (I’m using bootstrap css for convenience):

PopdownModule.directive('popdown', function() {
    return {
        restrict: 'E',
        scope: {},
        replace: true,
        controller: function($scope, PopdownAPI) {
            $scope.show = false;
            $scope.api = PopdownAPI;

            $scope.$watch('api.status', toggledisplay)
            $scope.$watch('api.message', toggledisplay)

            $scope.hide = function() {
                $scope.show = false;
                $scope.api.clear();
            };

            function toggledisplay() {
                $scope.show = !!($scope.api.status && $scope.api.message);               
            }
        },
        template: '<div class="alert alert-{{api.status}}" ng-show="show">' +
                  '  <button type="button" class="close" ng-click="hide()">&times;</button>' +
                  '  {{api.message}}' +
                  '</div>'
    }
})

Then I define an app module that depends on Popdown:

var app = angular.module('app', ['Popdown']);

app.controller('main', function($scope, PopdownAPI) {
    $scope.success = function(msg) { PopdownAPI.success(msg); }
    $scope.error   = function(msg) { PopdownAPI.error(msg); }
});

And the HTML looks like:

<html ng-app="app">
    <body ng-controller="main">
        <popdown></popdown>
        <a class="btn" ng-click="success('I am a success!')">Succeed</a>
        <a class="btn" ng-click="error('Alas, I am a failure!')">Fail</a>
    </body>
</html>

I’m not sure if it’s completely ideal, but it seemed like a reasonable way to set up communication with a global-ish popdown directive.

Again, for reference, the fiddle.

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