What's the right way to query a database and return an angular object?

Question

I created a factory for getting an array of Messages from my server. It looks kind of like this:

app.factory('messagesService', [
  '$resource',
  function($resource) {
    var self = this;

    self.service = $resource('/messages');

    self.all = function() {
      return self.service.query();
    };

    return {
      all: self.all
    };
  }
]);

This way I can run messagesService.all() from other controllers.

However this is returning the raw data from the server, and I would like to do some processing the data first. I am new to Angular and trying to understand the right way of doing things.

I would like to have my service return a more complete Message object.

I was thinking I would create a function and include it in the service file like this:

self.Message = function(data) {
  var self = this;

  self.author = data.author;
  self.message = $sce.trustAsHtml(data.message);
};

Then in the .query() I could create new Message(data) objects and return an array of those. Is that the right way to do this? Should my self.Message be encapsulated in a separate model file?

Kos Prov · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-04 17:24:28Z

1

Check out the latest version of $resource. You can register a "transformResponse" function which -I suspect- is what you want. Angular 1.2 has a lot of great features and it worths upgrading to it (sooner or later it will become a stable release).

BTW, I don't get why you use

var self = this;

Isn't that:

app.factory('messagesService', ['$resource', function($resource) {
    var messages = $resource('/messages'); // extra config necessary?
    return {
      all: messages.query
    };
}]);

good enough? The service API remains the same: messagesService.all().

edited Nov 4, 2013 at 17:24

answered Nov 4, 2013 at 17:18

Kos Prov

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3 Comments

Dihedral Over a year ago

I reduced my factory to just return a $resource object. It has a query method that includes transformResponse. However the transformResponse(data) part is just a string of my JSON return from the server. Am I asking for it wrongly? It seems like I should have a more significant place to put my model logic than in the query service. I can't help but think I've got the wrong perspective on this.

Kos Prov Over a year ago

I don't think you call it wrongly. transformResponse is pretty low-level but I can't think of any other method to return "model-enhanced" javascript objects from a $resource. Either deserialize with angular.fromJson and do your transformation or skip the whole $resource thing and go with $http and $q promises. Maybe if you read $resource source code you'll find something not very commonly used.

Dihedral Over a year ago

Is there a common pattern for pulling server data in Angular and adding custom methods to the return? It seems like any web-app would need to do that for every model it used. I still feel like I'm missing something horribly obvious or using the wrong words to ask the question.

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