ng-lollipop

Normalize HTTP requests for Angular applications

By default, Angular posts data as JSON, which is often not what you want. Also, data received as JSON needs some massaging (date to actual Date objects, numbers to actual Number objects etc.). This package handles all that for you.

Installation

Via NPM (recommended):

npm install --save ng-lollipop

Include the package in your application. This can be done via a tool like Browserify (recommended) or by simply adding a <script> tag pointing to the location where you installed it.

Add it as a dependency for your Angular application:

var app = angular.module('myAwesomeProject', ['lollipop']);

Registering the helpers

Lollipop exposes two main services: postRegularForm to replace JSON posts with normal urlencoded data strings, and normalizeIncomingHttpData to massage the received data. You'll need to inject them once in your application for them to take effect (since you might want to use just one of them):

app.run(['postRegularForm', 'normalizeIncomingHttpData', function (a, b) {
    // We're not using `a` and `b`, we just need them to be injected.
}]);

Normalizing data from non-HTTP sources

Since you might get your data from other sources (e.g. a Socket server), Lollipop also offers a more low level normalizeData service. You might for instance need to do something like this:

app.factory('Socket', ['SocketFactory', 'normalizeData', function (SocketFactory, normalizeData) {
    var socket = socketFactory({ioSocket: window.io.connect('')});
    var on = socket.on;
    socket.on = function (event, callback) {
        on.call(socket, event, function (data) {
            callback(normalizeData(data));
        });
    };
}]);

Handling alternative date formats

Out of the box, Lollipop recognizes date strings in a format compatible with most RMDBSs. Of course, your source might be a bit more exotic. There are a number of pluggable helpers you can modify to account for that:

The dateRegexes value

Lollipop defines a dateRegexes Angular value which you can override. It is simply an array of patterns to check. The first pattern matched gets returned (with index 0, the full match, already removed). The default implementation assumes that the date parts are "in order", i.e. they are passed directly to the Date constructor.

The dateCallbacks service

An object where each key matching the index in the matched date is called if present. The default implementation is to only offset key 1 by -1 since Javascript months are 0-indexed.

The convertValueToDate factory

Returns a function which converts matched date parts into a Date object. If your date parts are in a "weird" order, override this.

The isValueDate factory

This you'll rarely need to override; it loops through the dateRegexes array and applies dateCallbacks for defined keys.