How to use Restangular when the service for a collection returns a dictionary instead of an array? - rest

Question

I'm in the early phases of the development of a client app to an existing REST service and I'm trying to decide what to use for server communication. So far I'm loving Restangular documentation, it seems really solid, but I'm worried it's not going to work with the service because the responses look something like this:
{
"0": {
"name": "John",
"total": 230,
"score": 13
},
"1": {
"name": "Sally",
"total": 190,
"score": 12
},
"2": {
"name": "Harry",
"total": 3,
"score": 0
},
"...": "..."
}
I can't find in the docs if something like this is supported or how am I supposed to handle this type of response. Has anyone tried? Any ideas?

Answer 1

I'm the creator of Restangular :).
You can use that response with Restangular. You need to use the responseInterceptor. I guess that your response looks like that when you're getting an array. So you need to do:
RestangularProvider.setListTypeIsArray(false)
RestangularProvider.setResponseExtractor(function(response, operation) {
// Only for lists
if (operation === 'getList') {
// Gets all the values of the property and created an array from them
return _.values(response)
}
return response;
});
With this, it's going to work :)
Please let me know if this worked out fr you

Answer 2

You could do this if if you attached a "then" statement to the promise that you return.
That is, instead of this:
return <RectangularPromise>;
you have this:
return <RectangularPromise>.then(function(response){return _.values(response);};
Essentially, it's the same as #mgonto's answer, but doing it this way means that you don't have to modify your whole Rectangular Service if you only need to do this for one endpoint. (Although, another way to avoid this is to create multiple instances of the service as outlined in the readme).

Answer 3

unfortunately listTypeIsArray is not described in readme, so I haven't tried this option
but I resolved similar problem as described here
https://github.com/mgonto/restangular/issues/100#issuecomment-24649851

Answer 4

RestangularProvider.setListTypeIsArray() has been deprecated.
If you are expecting an object then handle it within addResponseInterceptor
app.config(function(RestangularProvider) {
// add a response interceptor
RestangularProvider.addResponseInterceptor(function(data, operation, what, url, response, deferred) {
var extractedData;
// .. to look for getList operations
if (operation === "getList") {
// .. and handle the data and meta data
extractedData = data.data.data;
extractedData.meta = data.data.meta;
} else {
extractedData = data.data;
}
return extractedData;
}); });
If you are expecting string response then convert it to array.
app.config(function(RestangularProvider) {
RestangularProvider.addResponseInterceptor(function(data, operation, what, url, response, deferred) {
var newData = data;
if (angular.isString(data)) {
newData = [data]; //covert string to array
}
return newData;
}); });