Can I inject a service into a directive in AngularJS?

I am trying to inject a service into a directive like below:

 var app = angular.module('app',[]);
 app.factory('myData', function(){
     return {
        name : "myName"
     }
 });
 app.directive('changeIt',function($compile, myData){
    return {
            restrict: 'C',
            link: function (scope, element, attrs) {
                scope.name = myData.name;
            }
        }
 });

But this is returning me an error Unknown provider: myDataProvider. Could someone please look into the code and tell me if I am doing something wrong?

You can do injection on Directives, and it looks just like it does everywhere else.

app.directive('changeIt', ['myData', function(myData){
    return {
        restrict: 'C',
        link: function (scope, element, attrs) {
            scope.name = myData.name;
        }
    }
 }]);

Change your directive definition from app.module to app.directive. Apart from that everything looks fine. Btw, very rarely do you have to inject a service into a directive. If you are injecting a service ( which usually is a data source or model ) into your directive ( which is kind of part of a view ), you are creating a direct coupling between your view and model. You need to separate them out by wiring them together using a controller.

It does work fine. I am not sure what you are doing which is wrong. Here is a plunk of it working.

http://plnkr.co/edit/M8omDEjvPvBtrBHM84Am

You can also use the $inject service to get whatever service you like. I find that useful if I don't know the service name ahead of time but know the service interface. For example a directive that will plug a table into an ngResource end point or a generic delete-record button which interacts with any api end point. You don't want to re-implement the table directive for every controller or data-source.

template.html

<div my-directive api-service='ServiceName'></div>

my-directive.directive.coffee

angular.module 'my.module'
  .factory 'myDirective', ($injector) ->
    directive = 
      restrict: 'A'
      link: (scope, element, attributes) ->
        scope.apiService = $injector.get(attributes.apiService)

now your 'anonymous' service is fully available. If it is ngResource for example you can then use the standard ngResource interface to get your data

For example:

scope.apiService.query((response) ->
  scope.data = response
, (errorResponse) ->
  console.log "ERROR fetching data for service: #{attributes.apiService}"
  console.log errorResponse.data
)

I have found this technique to be very useful when making elements that interact with API endpoints especially.