After Angular.js $http request, call complete function regardless of success or failure of promise

I'm not the world's greatest expert in Angular.js but understand you can do as follows :

whatever.then(function() {    // success code here}, function() {    // error code here    return true; // return anything that's not undefined (and not a `throw()`) to force the chain down the success path at the following then().}).then(function() {    // "complete" code here});

You are essentially forced to contrive something from one or more .then(), which is a $q promise's only method.

It depends on what you would like to do, but for clean-up logic and similar you may also use finally() to run either on fulfillment or rejection of your promise:

promise.finally(function () {    // Do something regardless of outcome.});

Please note that although finally() is supported by $q (and some other libraries) is not part of the official draft.

If you don't care if the request is successful or not, then you can pass the same callback to success and error...

   var cb = function(response){      // do something   };   $http.post(submitUrl, $scope.data).success(cb).error(cb);   // OR   $http.post(submitUrl, $scope.data).then(cb, cb);

But be aware that success and error callbacks have a different signature than the then callbacks.

• http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$http
• http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$q

Also, promises are recognized by the templating engine in angular, which means that in templates you can treat promises attached to a scope as if they were the resulting values.

This means that you can do this:

Controller:

$scope.article = $http.get('/articles/' + articleId);

Template:

<article ng-cloak>   <h3>{{article.title}}</h3>   <div>{{article.content}}</div></article>

And the view will update when the $http.get promise has been resolved.