ngResource is not suitable for single primitive value(such as string or number) response

[kuitos]

the web api(restful most of time) may return a single primitive value as response,such as a string or a number, like this

GET /users/count  ----> 10
GET /users/1/name ------> "Jack"

single primitive value(string or number or true&false and so on) is conform to the specifications of JSON,but now ngResource just support Array or Object response,and I know the reason when I saw the ngResource source code:

........
if (action.isArray) {
  value.length = 0;
  forEach(data, function(item) {
    if (typeof item === "object") {
      value.push(new Resource(item));
    } else {
      // Valid JSON values may be string literals, and these should not be converted
      // into objects. These items will not have access to the Resource prototype
      // methods, but unfortunately there
      value.push(item);
    }
  });
} else {
  shallowClearAndCopy(data, value);
  value.$promise = promise;
}
..........
/**
 * Create a shallow copy of an object and clear other fields from the destination
 */
function shallowClearAndCopy(src, dst) {
  dst = dst || {};

  angular.forEach(dst, function(value, key) {
    delete dst[key];
  });

  for (var key in src) {
    if (src.hasOwnProperty(key) && !(key.charAt(0) === '$' && key.charAt(1) === '$')) {
      dst[key] = src[key];
    }
  }

  return dst;
}

Obviously it can not resolve single string or number response.
What should I do when the response is single string with ngResource?

[kuitos]

Now I have to overwrite the shallowClearAndCopy method to support my business

function shallowClearAndCopy(src, dst) {
  dst = dst || {};

  angular.forEach(dst, function(value, key) {
    delete dst[key];
  });

  if (angular.isString(src) || angular.isNumber(src)) {
      dst._data = src;
    } else {
      for (var key in src) {
        if (src.hasOwnProperty(key) && !(key.charAt(0) === '$' && key.charAt(1) === '$')) {
          dst[key] = src[key];
        }
      }
    }

  return dst;
}

what it do is to wrap the single value response to {_data:xxx},and then I can get the value by resource._data.
and then override the $resource service use $provide.decorator.
It is so ugly but I do not have any other ideas

[Narretz]

Are you saying that "string" and 4434 are valid JSOn responses? I don't think that is the case.

[Narretz]

Ok, it looks like it is possible to have single values as valid JSON, see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159 and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13318420/json-standard-a-single-string-value

I'd consider it bad practice though to have an API return this. I'd also expect not many people to write their JSON this way. If there's a PR maybe we'll consider it.

[kuitos]

from the offical specification of JSON,http://json.org/

A value can be a string in double quotes, or a number, or true or false or null, or an object or an array. These structures can be nested

yes response a single value is in a few case usually,but I don`t think it is a bad practice.Such as a api for invoker to get a username or a total count,why I need to wrap the response as a object but not the original primitive value?I think it is redundant.
So I have to give them a _value(or other key) key to wrap them as an object and I think it is the only way to compatible with the primitive format of JSON response under the existing design of ngResource.

[pkozlowski-opensource]

IMO we should not try to fix this one. Returning primitives from $resource call doesn't make sense since we need a resource should be an object (so it can be enriched with $resource-specific methods). I've got an impression that fixing this would encourage people even more to use $resource as a general-purpose XHR call. This is not what it was designed for and $http should be used instead. Using $resource to fetch a single value is wasteful.