javascript - AngularJS, $http and transformResponse

Question

I'm getting a strange behaviour with AngularJS's $http and not really understanding how transformResponse works (the docs are a bit light on this one).

    WebAssets.get = function () {
        return $http.get('/api/webassets/list', {
            transformResponse: [function (data, headersGetter) {
                // not sure what to do here?!
                return data;
            }].concat($http.defaults.transformResponse) // presume this isn't needed, added for clarity
        }).then(function (response) {
            return new WebAssets(response.data);
        });
    };

The api returns an array of objects:

[{"webasset_name": "...", "application_id": "...", "etc": "..."}, ... ]

But when transformResponse has done it's evil business the data has transformed into an indexed object:

{"0":{"webasset_name":"...","application_id":"...", "etc": "..."}, "1":....}

I want to keep the original data structure (an array of objects).

Answer 1

To get angular to not convert your data into an object you need to override the behavior of the default $httpProvider.defaults.transformResponse. It is actually an array of transformers. You could just set it to be empty: $http.defaults.transformResponse = []; Here is an example transformer I have used to convert 64-bit long ints to strings:

function longsToStrings(response) {
    //console.log("transforming response");
    var numbers = /("[^"]*":s*)(d{15,})([,}])/g;
    var newResponse = response.replace(numbers, "$1"$2"$3");
    return newResponse;
}

To add a transformer to the default list, say ahead of the JSON deserializer, you can do this:

$http.defaults.transformResponse.unshift(longsToStrings);