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@title HTTP Client
@intro Use an HTTP Client to talk to a remote server.
@description
HTTP is the primary protocol for browser/server communication.
The WebSocket protocol is another important communication technology;
it isn't covered in this page.Modern browsers support two HTTP-based APIs:
XMLHttpRequest (XHR) and
JSONP. A few browsers also support
Fetch.
The !{_Angular_http_library} simplifies application programming with the XHR and JSONP APIs. This page covers:
- [Search parameters](#search-parameters).
- [More fun with observables](#more-observables).
A live example illustrates these topics.
Demos
This page describes server communication with the help of the following demos:
The root AppComponent orchestrates these demos:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/app.component.ts'}
Providing HTTP services
First, configure the application to use server communication facilities.
The !{_Angular_Http} client communicates with the server using a familiar HTTP request/response protocol.
The !{_Http} client is one of a family of services in the !{_Angular_http_library}.
Before you can use the !{_Http} client, you need to register it as a service provider with the dependency injection system.
Read about providers in the Dependency Injection page.
Register providers by importing other NgModules to the root NgModule in app.module.ts.
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/app.module.1.ts'}
The HttpModule is necessary for making HTTP calls.
Though the JsonpModule isn't necessary for plain HTTP,
there is a JSONP demo later in this page.
Loading its module now saves time.
The Tour of Heroes HTTP client demo
The first demo is a mini-version of the tutorial's "Tour of Heroes" (ToH) application.
This version gets some heroes from the server, displays them in a list, lets the user add new heroes, and saves them to the server.
The app uses the !{_Angular_Http} client to communicate via XMLHttpRequest (XHR).
It works like this:
This demo has a single component, the HeroListComponent. Here's its template:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero-list.component.html'}
It presents the list of heroes with an ngFor.
Below the list is an input box and an Add Hero button where you can enter the names of new heroes
and add them to the database.
A template reference variable, newHeroName, accesses the
value of the input box in the (click) event binding.
When the user clicks the button, that value passes to the component's addHero method and then
the event binding clears it to make it ready for a new hero name.
Below the button is an area for an error message.
{@a oninit}
{@a HeroListComponent}
The HeroListComponent class
Here's the component class:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero-list.component.ts' region='component'}
Angular injects a HeroService into the constructor
and the component calls that service to fetch and save data.
The component does not talk directly to the !{_Angular_Http} client.
The component doesn't know or care how it gets the data.
It delegates to the HeroService.
This is a golden rule: always delegate data access to a supporting service class.
Although at runtime the component requests heroes immediately after creation,
you don't call the service's get method in the component's constructor.
Instead, call it inside the ngOnInit lifecycle hook
and rely on Angular to call ngOnInit when it instantiates this component.
This is a best practice.
Components are easier to test and debug when their constructors are simple, and all real work
(especially calling a remote server) is handled in a separate method.With a basic understanding of the component, you're ready to look inside the HeroService.
{@a HeroService}
Fetch data with http.get
In many of the previous samples the app faked the interaction with the server by returning mock heroes in a service like this one:
{@example 'toh-4/ts/src/app/hero.service.ts' region='just-get-heroes'}
You can revise that HeroService to get the heroes from the server using the !{_Angular_Http} client service:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='v1'}
Notice that the !{_Angular_Http} client service is
injected into the HeroService constructor.
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='ctor'}
Look closely at how to call !{_priv}http.get:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='http-get'}
You pass the resource URL to get and it calls the server which returns heroes.
The server returns heroes once you've set up the in-memory web api described in the appendix below. Alternatively, you can temporarily target a JSON file by changing the endpoint URL:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='endpoint-json'}
{@a extract-data}
Process the response object
Remember that the getHeroes() method used an !{_priv}extractData helper method to map the !{_priv}http.get response object to heroes:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='extract-data'}
The response object doesn't hold the data in a form the app can use directly.
You must parse the response data into a JSON object.
Parse to JSON
Don't expect the decoded JSON to be the heroes !{_array} directly.
This server always wraps JSON results in an object with a data
property. You have to unwrap it to get the heroes.
This is conventional web API behavior, driven by
security concerns.
Make no assumptions about the server API.
Not all servers return an object with a `data` property.
Do not return the response object
The getHeroes() method could have returned the HTTP response but this wouldn't
be a best practice.
The point of a data service is to hide the server interaction details from consumers.
The component that calls the HeroService only wants heroes and is kept separate
from getting them, the code dealing with where they come from, and the response object.
{@a error-handling}
Always handle errors
An important part of dealing with I/O is anticipating errors by preparing to catch them and do something with them. One way to handle errors is to pass an error message back to the component for presentation to the user, but only if it says something that the user can understand and act upon.
This simple app conveys that idea, albeit imperfectly, in the way it handles a getHeroes error.
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='error-handling'}
{@a subscribe}
{@a hero-list-component}
HeroListComponent error handling
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero-list.component.ts' region='getHeroes'}
Want to see it fail? In the HeroService, reset the api endpoint to a bad value. Afterward, remember to restore it.
Send data to the server
So far you've seen how to retrieve data from a remote location using an HTTP service. Now you'll add the ability to create new heroes and save them in the backend.
You'll write a method for the HeroListComponent to call, an addHero() method, that takes
just the name of a new hero and returns an Observable of Hero. It begins like this:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='addhero-sig'}
To implement it, you must know the server's API for creating heroes.
This sample's data server follows typical REST guidelines.
It expects a POST request
at the same endpoint as GET heroes.
It expects the new hero data to arrive in the body of the request,
structured like a Hero entity but without the id property.
The body of the request should look like this:
The server generates the id and returns the entire JSON representation
of the new hero including its generated id. The hero arrives tucked inside a response object
with its own data property.
Now that you know how the API works, implement addHero()as follows:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='addhero'}
Headers
In the headers object, the Content-Type specifies that the body represents JSON.
JSON results
As with getHeroes(), use the !{_priv}extractData() helper to extract the data
from the response.
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero-list.component.ts' region='addHero'}
Cross-Origin Requests: Wikipedia example
You just learned how to make XMLHttpRequests using the !{_Angular_Http} service.
This is the most common approach for server communication, but it doesn't work in all scenarios.
For security reasons, web browsers block XHR calls to a remote server whose origin is different from the origin of the web page.
The origin is the combination of URI scheme, hostname, and port number.
This is called the same-origin policy.
Modern browsers do allow XHR requests to servers from a different origin if the server supports the
CORS protocol.
If the server requires user credentials, you'll enable them in the request headers.
Some servers do not support CORS but do support an older, read-only alternative called JSONP.
Wikipedia is one such server.
This Stack Overflow answer covers many details of JSONP.### Search wikipedia
Here is a simple search that shows suggestions from Wikipedia as the user types in a text box:
{@a xsrf}
Guarding against Cross-Site Request Forgery
In a cross-site request forgery (CSRF or XSRF), an attacker tricks the user into visiting a different web page with malignant code that secretly sends a malicious request to your application's web server,
The server and client application must work together to thwart this attack.
Angular's Http client does its part by applying a default CookieXSRFStrategy automatically to all requests.
The CookieXSRFStrategy supports a common anti-XSRF technique in which the server sends a randomly
generated authentication token in a cookie named XSRF-TOKEN.
The HTTP client adds an X-XSRF-TOKEN header with that token value to subsequent requests.
The server receives both the cookie and the header, compares them, and processes the request only if the cookie and header match.
See the XSRF topic on the Security page for more information about XSRF and Angular's XSRFStrategy counter measures.
{@a override-default-request-options}
Override default request headers (and other request options)
Request options (such as headers) are merged into the
default RequestOptions
before the request is processed.
The HttpModule provides these default options via the RequestOptions token.
You can override these defaults to suit your application needs.
by creating a custom sub-class of RequestOptions
that sets the default options for the application.
This sample creates a class that sets the default Content-Type header to JSON.
It exports a constant with the necessary RequestOptions provider to simplify registration in AppModule.
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/default-request-options.service.ts'}
Then it registers the provider in the root AppModule.
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/app.module.ts' region='provide-default-request-options'}
Remember to include this provider during setup when unit testing the app's HTTP services.After this change, the header option setting in HeroService.addHero is no longer necessary,
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='addhero'}
You can confirm that DefaultRequestOptions is working by examing HTTP requests in the browser developer tools' network tab.
If you're short-circuiting the server call with something like the in-memory web api,
try commenting-out the addHero header option,
set a breakpoint on the POST call, and step through the request processing
to verify the header is there.
Individual requests options, like this one, take precedence over the default RequestOptions.
It might be wise to keep the addHero request header setting for extra safety.
{@a in-mem-web-api}
Appendix: Tour of Heroes in-memory web api
If the app only needed to retrieve data, you could get the heroes from a heroes.json file:
You wrap the heroes array in an object with a data property for the same reason that a data server does:
to mitigate the security risk
posed by top-level JSON arrays.You'd set the endpoint to the JSON file like this:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='endpoint-json'}
The get heroes scenario would work, but since the app can't save changes to a JSON file, it needs a web API server. Because there isn't a real server for this demo, it substitutes the Angular in-memory web api simulator for the actual XHR backend service.
The in-memory web api is not part of Angular proper.
It's an optional service in its own
angular-in-memory-web-api
library installed with npm (see package.json).
See the
README file
for configuration options, default behaviors, and limitations.
The in-memory web API gets its data from !{_a_ca_class_with} a createDb()
method that returns a map whose keys are collection names and whose values
are !{_array}s of objects in those collections.
Here's the class for this sample, based on the JSON data:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/hero-data.ts'}
Ensure that the HeroService endpoint refers to the web API:
{@example 'server-communication/ts/src/app/toh/hero.service.ts' region='endpoint'}
Here is the final, revised version of src/app/app.module.ts, demonstrating these steps.
Import the `InMemoryWebApiModule` _after_ the `HttpModule` to ensure that
the `XHRBackend` provider of the `InMemoryWebApiModule` supersedes all others.
See the full source code in the .