EventEmitter in angular services, good or bad?

Question

I was using EventEmitter and @Output in Angular services, today one of the colleagues mentioned it's not a good practice.

I found this post mentioning it's a bad practice and it seems mostly is personal opinion, and this answer is mentioning it's OK to use it. I couldn't find any official document about it, so if somebody knows an official answer for it please post.

Official doc about EventEmittter

In an Angular serivce, you're better off just using a `subject` I would've thought. Certainly I can't see even benefit in adding the `@Output` within a service — user184994, Jun 01 '18 at 16:34
Inputs and Outputs should be used for binding to attributes/events of components (targeting them from the HTML), NOT in a service. Like mentioned above, it would be better to have a subject or an observable that can be retrieved through a get function or something. — MichaelSolati, Jun 01 '18 at 16:48
I was wondering why my question gets down votes and close votes, and almost same question got 132 up votes https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36076700/what-is-the-proper-use-of-an-eventemitter/36076701#36076701 — Reza, Jun 01 '18 at 16:50
It's uncommon as plain Subjects are preferred. EventEmitter is an enhanced Subject, so it works, but why complicate things? — bc1105, Jun 01 '18 at 17:00
@bc1105 thanks, using `@output` is easier and more neat comparing to `BehaviorSubject` and `Subject` — Reza, Jun 01 '18 at 17:03

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 13 '20 at 15:05

I was using EventEmitter and @Output in Angular services, today one of the coleagues mentioned it's not a good practice.

The annotation @Output() has no effect in a service. It is used to tell the Angular template compiler to bind an Observable to a template expression.

If I saw @Output() in a service, then I'd tell the developer to remove it.

EventEmitter is an Observable and there are no side effects in using it in a service, but there are also no benefits.

You can use any Observable type of emitter in either a component or service. There are two reasons why we have EventEmitter. 1) it pre-dates the Angular teams decision to commit to using observables and they thought they might need their own implementation, 2) it can emit values in the next JavaScript cycle (optional setting).

There were edge cases were people needed to emit changes in the next cycle to avoid problems with change detection.

Secure Your Observables

 @Injectable()
 export class MyService {
       public events: Subject<any> = new Subject();
 }

The problem with the above service is that anyone can emit values from the public events. You want your service to be the only code that handles emitting values.

 @Injectable()
 export class MyService {
       private _events: Subject<any> = new Subject();
       public get events(): Observable<any> {
           return this._event.asObservable();
       }
 }

The above is better because access to the Subject.next(..) is private. Consumers can only subscribe to the observable.

If you followed the components approach. It forces you to expose your emitter which isn't a good idea.

@Injectable()
export class MyService {
       @Output()   // <<< has no effect
       public events: EventEmitter<any> = new EventEmitter();
       // ^^ makes the emitter public
}

Components need to have their properties as public if they are to be used in templates, but this isn't the case for services.

`return this._event;` should be `return this._event.asObservable();` or you can just cast it to Subject and call next anyway — Drakarah, Jun 05 '19 at 07:22

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 02 '23 at 22:42

As of today I realized having EventEmitter at the service level is rather bad because when subscribing to to the event handler in ngInit as I keep switching pages my subscriptions accumulate and one time emit() is handled X time subscribed.

    export class XService {

        @Output() test: EventEmitter<number> = new EventEmitter<number>();
  
        public parentInitCount : number = 0;
        public childInitCount : number = 0;
    }

Parent component

    constructor(private events: XService) { }

    public ngInitCounter: number = 0;

    ngOnInit() {

        this.ngInitCounter++;
        this.events.parentInitCount++;

    }

    runJob() {
        this.events.test.emit(this.ngInitCounter);
    }

Child

    constructor(private events: XService) { }

    public ngInitCounter: number = 0;

    ngOnInit() {

        this.events.test.subscribe((value)=> { //subscriptions will accumulate going back and forth between pages, because service keeps state
            console.log('test event, parent ngInitCount: ' + value + ' child ngInitCount: ' +  this.ngInitCount);
            console.log('test event2, service ngInitCount: ' + this.events.parentInitCount + ' service child ngInitCount: ' +  this.events.childInitCount);
        });

        this.ngInitCount++;
        this.events.childInitCount++;
    }

EventEmitter in angular services, good or bad?

2 Answers2

Secure Your Observables

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