I'm developing a Firefox extension using AngularJS and I'm trying to use some of the AngularJS services inside my main.js file. I use require() to include the relevant modules and angular.bootstrap() to initialize the modules.
However, I always get the following error:
Reference Error: window is not defined
Is there anything else I can do about it?
AngularJS isn't really meant for this kind of environment - it is an MVC framework and in your case V (the view) is missing. You don't tell what you want to use AngularJS for but you might want to consider using it in your content scripts rather than main.js.
That said, AngularJS is often using window simply as a means to access the global object. This is easy enough to fix, the next-to-last line of AngularJS source code says:
})(window, document);
This should be changed into:
})(this, document);
This will at least allow the functions to proceed that don't really require a view. Of course you would still need to remove the last line (the one attempting to insert a stylesheet into the document) and export the angular variable instead:
exports.angular = angular;
There isn't much detail so I am unsure if this suggestion fits with what you want to do. If you want to use some JS libraries that require a DOM and don't want to show a document to the user, consider using the page-worker module:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/packages/addon-kit/page-worker.html
You will need to set up event-driven communications between the worker and main.js, as with any other content document used with SDK code:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/dev-guide/guides/events.html
May be you have to get window object via
var window = require("window-utils").activeBrowserWindow;?
What is the view that you are trying to update? You should be able to provide angular.bootstrap with some non-root element to start compiling from. http://docs.angularjs.org/api/angular.bootstrap
If you're using some service that relies on window, you also might need to supply your own tweaked $window service. http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$window