Angulars $http.post rationale

Question

The comparable jQuery function

$.post("/example/handler", {foo: 1, bar: 2});

will create a request with the post parameters foo=1&bar=2. Whereas

$http.post("/example/handler", {foo : 1, bar: 2});

seems to send a POST request with the body {"foo":1,"bar":2} rather than the form-uriencoded version. To get what I think is the expected behavior here, I need to do something like

myModule.config(function ($httpProvider) {
    $httpProvider.defaults.headers.post['Content-Type'] = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8';
    $httpProvider.defaults.transformRequest = function(data){
        return _.map(data, function (val, k) { return encodeURI(k) + "=" + encodeURI(val); }).join("&");
    }
});

in the module config.

Can anyone explain the rationale behind $http.post argument handling? Is there a situation where I'd want Angulars' default behavior, or some hidden advantage I'm not seeing?

Mark Rajcok · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-28 04:55:55Z

2

I'm not too familiar with the HTTP protocol, but aren't POST requests normally used to send content, not parameters? Normally, I think GET is used with parameters.

I think you should be able to add a config object to the POST request, and specify the params property:

params – {Object.} – Map of strings or objects which will be turned to ?key1=value1&key2=value2 after the url. If the value is not a string, it will be JSONified.

So maybe something like this will work:

$http.post("/example/handler", {}, {params: {foo: 1, bar: 2} })

(Above code snippet is untested... I'm not sure the syntax is correct.)

answered Dec 28, 2012 at 4:55

Mark Rajcok

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2 Comments

generalhenry Over a year ago

For POST requests you don't (typically) send parameters in the url, you send them in the body. But they do typically use the same key1=value1&key2=value2 format, which is what HTML forms send.

Inaimathi Over a year ago

This does, in fact, work. There's an optional third argument to $http.post whose params property is serialized into standard POST parameters.

generalhenry · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-28 05:17:12Z

0

I think you answered your own question. Converting a JS object to form encoding takes work and gets tricky for more complicated structures, while converting JS objects to JSON is trivial and therefor default. What back-end are you using that's having trouble accepting JSON encoding?

answered Dec 28, 2012 at 5:17

generalhenry

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1 Comment

Inaimathi Over a year ago

I'm using tornado, and it's not trouble, it's just that I'd have to manually args = json.loads(self.request.body) if I were to use what seems to be Angular's default behavior. Most servers I've worked with automatically parse out the standard form-encoded format, while additional work is typically required (either at the front-end or at the back-end) to use JSON in the same context. It seems that a task which both [must typically be done] and [takes work and gets tricky for more complicated structures] is precisely the sort of thing that should be handled by an abstraction layer.

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