What's the best way to create a dummy $resource for development purposes in Angular?

Question

I'm developing an Angular app (actually, an Ionic app) that relies on a REST API. To communicate with the API, I will inject $resource s into my controllers.

I want to focus on the app now, and worry about the backend later—so I'd like to create dummy versions of my various $resource s. For example, my dummy Products $resource will contain a few sample product records (hardcoded as JSON), and will support/mimic the same CRUD operations that the real $resource will eventually support.

In other words, it will be similar to this —but will mimic the same API as $resource (promises, error handling, etc.).

Obviously, I could roll my own solution to this—but surely this is already a solved problem. What's the standard approach?

(I've done a fair bit of Googling around this, but everything I find talks about unit testing and test frameworks—which I know little about. Anyway, that seems like a slightly different problem than the one I'm trying to solve. I've also seen a lot about $httpBackend —but (1) that mocks the lower-level $http service, not $resource , which is what I need, and (2) it seems to be meant for use in the context of unit tests, which is not what I'm trying to do.)

Answer 1

I finally found an example of using $httpBackend without a unit test .

Essentially, you can inject $httpBackend into the run() method of your module, like this:

app.run(function($httpBackend) {

  var phones = [{name: 'phone1'}, {name: 'phone2'}]; 

  $httpBackend.whenPOST('/phones').respond(function(method, url, data, headers){
    console.log('Received these data:', method, url, data, headers);
    phones.push(angular.fromJson(data));
    return [200, {}, {}];
  });

  $httpBackend.whenGET('/phones').respond(function(method,url,data) {
    console.log("Getting phones");
    return [200, phones, {}];
  });
});