[guac]

> Constants are especially interesting because they can be injected into the .config function of a module. No other provider can be injected for the very good reason that .config cannot inject transitive dependencies.

It should be noted than you can inject providers themselves in .config. Most users do this with built-in $routeProvider (which provides $route).

It's not mentioned in the post but he could pass "awesomeProvider" into module.config and (if it was more interesting than just a $get method) do something with it during the config phase.

With $routeProvider you would use the .when method to configure angular routing. It's .$get method returns the $route instance.

[randall]

This makes me think Angular 2.0 hopefully will trim some of the conceptual cruft in a few years. Interesting! Thanks for the insight.

[michaelw]

$routeProvider and $location are special in that can be injected into .config. It may be that they are actually implemented as special constants. I do not believe that non constant providers can be injected.

Do you have a fiddle or plunk that shows this working?

[guac]

How about this: http://jsfiddle.net/pJ8Mt/1/

It's a poor example since I couldn't think of anything useful off the top of my head but it shows how you might modify a service at config time by creating its provider yourself.

Also I believe .config executes immediately so the provider needs to be defined beforehand (in this case above .config, but probably better to define it in another module to ensure it's available at config time). When I defined it after .config angular complained it couldn't find awesomeProvider.