adding controller later

Question

I'm trying to create an NG app where parts can be enabled/disabled dynamically. The idea is to have an "admin" page, where parts of the app can be enabled or disabled, and then see new functionality appear, in the form of an adjusted menu at the top of the page, and matching routes, controllers, etc loaded into the app (I'm using SocketStream w/ NG).

The first step was to add / remove routes dynamically, for which I found a solution at https://stackoverflow.com/a/13173667 - working well, as far as I can tell.

Next, adding items to the menu bar - easy with ng-repeat on ul/li items.

So the app adjusts its menu and recognizes the corresponding route. So far so good.

The problem comes with registering a controller. I'm calling myApp.controller('SandboxCtrl',[...]) with proper args (same as what worked when initialising statically on startup), but the controller does not appear to get loaded or inited properly. Navigating to the newly added route generates errors such as:

Error: Argument 'SandboxCtrl' is not a function, got undefined
assertArg@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:973
assertArgFn@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:984
@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:4638
update@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:14007
$broadcast@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:8098
@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:7258
wrappedCallback@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:6658
wrappedCallback@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:6658
@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:6695
$eval@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:7848
$digest@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:7713
$apply@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:7934
@http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.1.1/angular.js:5433

I'm currently at a loss on how to proceed. I've not been able to find a solution on the web. The app is too large to put in a jsFiddle, but I can commit the last changes on GitHub if needed.

Questions: is this feasible? what can I do to debug this? any examples I could look at?

EDIT: The code is now at https://github.com/jcw/housemon (needs node/npm/redis). It's easy to reproduce the problem: launch with "npm start", browse to localhost:3333, go to admin tab, click on "jcw-sandbox" and then "Install". Top menu will update with new a "Sandbox" entry. Clicking on that entry generates the error shown above.

Oh, almost forgot: relevant code is in client/code/app/main.coffee and client/code/modules/routes.coffee ...

Answer 1

The answer turns out to be two-fold:

• the NG calls were made from SocketStream RPC callbacks, and had to be wrapped in $scope.$apply calls - my bad, didn't know about this SS/NG interaction
• the rest of the solution was outlined by @matys84pl - pick up $controllerProvider (and $filterProvider) early on, so they can be called at a later time instead of the normal "app.controller" and "app.filter" members, which don't seem to work anymore later on

Example code in GitHub, I'll link to a specific commit so this answer stays valid:

https://github.com/jcw/housemon/commit/f199ff70e3000dbf57836f0cbcbb3306c31279de