HATEOAS client with AngularJS

Question

I was wondering if there were any features hidden in Angular or exposed by some 3rd-party libraries to easily create HATEOAS-compliant Restful clients.

On backend side, I am using Spring Data/REST to produce an HATEOAS JSON API. Consuming it, though, is quite another story.

For instance, I've got those 3 entities:

• Company {name, address}
• Employee {firstName, lastName, employer[Company]}
• Activity {rate, day, employee[Employee], client[Company]}

and requesting an activity (the most complex entity of the model) produces something like this:

{
    links: [],
    content: [{
            rate: 456,
            day: 1366754400000,
            links: [{
                rel: "self",
                href: "http://localhost:8080/api/activities/1"
            },
            {
                rel: "activities.activity.client",
                href: "http://localhost:8080/api/activities/1/client"
            },
            {
                rel: "activities.activity.employee",
                href: "http://localhost:8080/api/activities/1/employee"
            }]
        }]
}

My API talks in terms of REST (resources identified by links). An Activity has an Employee for instance. What I really want to use is : {rate: 456, day: 1366754400000, employee: {firstName:"xxx", lastName:"xxx" ...}}.

However, as you can see in the first output, my Activity only contains a link to the employee, not its data. Is there anything in Angular or in a 3rd-party library to resolve those links and embed the resulting data instead?

Any input on this?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Checkout angular-hateoas. ITs an AngularJS module for using $resource with a HATEOAS-enabled REST API.