rootScope functions not being called when using ngIdle

Question

I am using the ngIdle library and as the documentation states there are certain methods that you can call to check for user inactivity, and I have put these on the root scope.

app.run(function($rootScope) {
    $rootScope.$on('IdleTimeout', function() {
        alert('you will be logged out');
    });

    $rootScope.$on('IdleStart', function () {
        alert('test');
    });
});

These functions are never being called and I think that it might be a problem more to do with $rootscope rather than the ngidle library.

There are not any errors in console, and the ngidle library is included correctly. Any Ideas?

Answer 1

I spent some time struggling with this too; none of the events were firing at all. Turns out that you need to call Idle.watch() so that the timing starts.

This isn't well documented; documentation is patchy and none of the examples I saw had this. All looked just like the code you have so I couldn't figure out what's wrong until I saw it in the Getting Started section on the library's GitHub page. It's not explicitly mentioned though, you have to look closely.

.run(function(Idle){
    // start watching when the app runs. also starts the Keepalive service by default.
    Idle.watch();
});

Then the second catch: once you get auto-logged out once, it will no longer time your session if you login again without reloading the app. You need to call Idle.watch() again from your Login method to reset the timers and start again.

Answer 2

For me ng-idle works fine using the $rootScope. But I wasted some time waiting for the events to fire until I recognized, that the configuration expects seconds instead of milliseconds ;)

app.config(function(IdleProvider) {
    // configure Idle settings
    IdleProvider.idle(5); // in seconds!
    IdleProvider.timeout(5); // in seconds!
});