Angular JS POST request not sending JSON data

Question

I am trying to send an object as JSON to my webservice in Flask that is expecting JSON in the request data.

I have tested the service manually by sending JSON data and it works fine. However, when I try to make a http POST request through angular controller, the web server sends me a message saying it did not receive JSON.

When I inspect the request headers in Chrome it appears that data is not being sent in JSON but regular key/value pairs even through the Content Type is set to application/json

Request Method:POST
Status Code:200 OK
Request Headersview source
Accept:application/json, text/plain, */*
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:49
Content-Type:application/json;charset=UTF-8
DNT:1
Host:localhost:5000
Origin:http://localhost:5000
Referer:http://localhost:5000/
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.116 Safari/537.36
X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest
Request Payload
application=AirFare&d1=10-APR-2013&d2=14-APR-2013

If you seen the last line below Request Payload, you can see the data is not in JSON format.

This is the HTTP POST call in my angular controller:

$http({
            url: '/user_to_itsr',
            method: "POST",
            data: {application:app, from:d1, to:d2},
            headers: {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
        }).success(function (data, status, headers, config) {
                $scope.users = data.users; // assign  $scope.persons here as promise is resolved here 
            }).error(function (data, status, headers, config) {
                $scope.status = status + ' ' + headers;
            });
};  

I am sending the data as an object {} but I have tried to send it after serializing by JSON.stringify however, nothing I do seems to send JSON to the server.

Really appreciate if somebody can help out.

Answer 1

If you are serializing your data object, it will not be a proper json object. Take what you have, and just wrap the data object in a JSON.stringify().

$http({
    url: '/user_to_itsr',
    method: "POST",
    data: JSON.stringify({application:app, from:d1, to:d2}),
    headers: {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
}).success(function (data, status, headers, config) {
    $scope.users = data.users; // assign  $scope.persons here as promise is resolved here 
}).error(function (data, status, headers, config) {
    $scope.status = status + ' ' + headers;
});

Answer 2

I have tried your example and it works just fine:

var app = 'AirFare';
var d1 = new Date();
var d2 = new Date();

$http({
    url: '/api/test',
    method: 'POST',
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
    data: {application: app, from: d1, to: d2}
});

Output:

Content-Length:91
Content-Type:application/json
Host:localhost:1234
Origin:http://localhost:1234
Referer:http://localhost:1234/index.html
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.66 Safari/537.36
X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest
Request Payload
{"application":"AirFare","from":"2013-10-10T11:47:50.681Z","to":"2013-10-10T11:47:50.681Z"}

Are you using the latest version of AngularJS?

Answer 3

You can use FormData API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FormData

var data = new FormData;
data.append('from', from);
data.append('to', to);

$http({
    url: '/path',
    method: 'POST',
    data: data,
    transformRequest: false,
    headers: { 'Content-Type': undefined }
})

This solution from http://uncorkedstudios.com/blog/multipartformdata-file-upload-with-angularjs