Correct pattern using Angular $resource to get related data

Question

I understood that the concept of $resource in AngularJS is to return

A resource, an object representing this resource (get, update, delete)
A list of objects representing this resource (query)

I am using a backend which does not provide all needed information in one shot.

For example: /User/:id

user = User.get({id: userId}); returns a User. Great.

If I need to get the number of his friends, I have another request wich will be like:

/User/:id/count=friend

And return:

{ count: 17 }

Here I am stuck, I can't use my user variable, or I will lose my user object. Plus the result will be a number, which does not represent my user anymore.

The 'dirty' way would be to go back with $http for this and to assign the result to user.friendsNumber = data.count.

But still not clean, if I user.$put() something, I lose my user.friendsNumber as it will be reassigned.

What is the correct way to handle this properly?

Declare a custom action ? $resource(url, [paramDefaults], [actions], options); — merlin
– merlin, Commented Oct 30, 2014 at 8:39

Dylan · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-30 08:54:05Z

2

You can specify the action like so, and I believe additional parameters just become regular get variables.

angoApp.factory('User', function($resource) {
  return $resource('/User/:id', {
    id: '@id'
  }, {
    countFriends: {
      method: 'GET',
      params: {
        count: 'friends'
      }
    }
});

...

User.$countFriends({id:123});
//This should call /User/123?count=friends

answered Oct 30, 2014 at 8:54

Dylan

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2 Comments

Laurent Over a year ago

No problem for adding custom actions and doing requests, this is currently what I am doing. But I feel like this is not clean. What I am interested is to assign more properties like countFriend to a parent user ressource (already resolved), which I am sometimes updated, so losing properties I newly assigned like countFriend.

Dylan Over a year ago

So it sounds more like you're looking for persistence like local storage? Resource manages a CRUD, but maintaining the response data is just a matter of how you handle that object.

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