I’m also building a website with angular and I came across this same obstacle for global 401 handling. I ended up using http interceptor when I came across this blog post. Maybe you’ll find it as helpful as I did.
“Authentication in AngularJS (or similar) based application.”, espeo software
EDIT: final solution
angular.module('myApp', ['myApp.filters', 'myApp.services', 'myApp.directives'], function ($routeProvider, $locationProvider, $httpProvider) {
var interceptor = ['$rootScope', '$q', function (scope, $q) {
function success(response) {
return response;
}
function error(response) {
var status = response.status;
if (status == 401) {
window.location = "./index.html";
return;
}
// otherwise
return $q.reject(response);
}
return function (promise) {
return promise.then(success, error);
}
}];
$httpProvider.responseInterceptors.push(interceptor);