Avoid multiple ajax requests angularJS

Question

I am trying to avoid multiple ajax requests to the server in a factory. I already added a small caching service, but it is not enough for what I aim: this factory can be called several times before the server responds, causing the generation of multiple requests to the server.

To avoid this I added a second promise object, which if the AJAX request have been performed and the object is not yet in cache, than it should wait for a second promise to be resolved, but looks like I am missing something.

This is my code:

myApp.factory('User', ['Restangular', '$q',
  function (Restangular, $q) {
    var userCache, alreadyRun = false;
    return {
      getUser: function () {
        var deferred = $q.defer(), firstRun= $q.defer();

        if (!userCache && !alreadyRun) {
          alreadyRun = true;

          Restangular.all('user').getList().then(function (user) {
            console.log('getting user live ');
            userCache = user[0].email;
            firstRun.resolve(user[0].email);
          });
        } else if (!userCache && alreadyRun) {
          console.log('waiting for the first promise to be resolved ');
          firstRun.then(function(user) {
            console.log('resolving the promise');
            deferred.resolve(userCache);
          });

        } else {
          console.log('resolving the promise from the cache');
          deferred.resolve(userCache)
        }
        return deferred.promise;
      }
    };
  }
]);

Answer 1

You could just return the original promise if the request has already been made. Something like this should work;

myApp.factory('User', ['Restangular', '$q',
  function (Restangular, $q) {
    var deferred = false;

    return {
      getUser: function () {

        if(deferred) {
          return deferred.promise;
        }

        deferred = $q.defer();

        Restangular.all('user').getList().then(function (user) {
          deferred.resolve(user[0].email);
        });

        return deferred.promise;
      }
    };
  }
]);

Also have a look at the Restangular documentation for caching requests