Can angular resource do a bulk restful operation?

Question

Say I have a todo application and clicking a checkbox on any individual Todo marks it as complete and does a PUT operation.

Then there is a checkbox to 'mark all complete' or 'mark all incomplete'. This should mark every todo as completed/incomplete, regardless of what its individual status is.

When using angular-resource, what is the best practice way to update all the items. Is it possible to do it in a single bulk request and have all the items updated? Or would I be better off just updating each one individually?

Answer 1

You could extend your Angular resource by providing a custom action, for example:

var Todo = $resource('api/todo/:todo_id', {todo_id: '@id'}, {
  markAllComplete: { method: 'POST', params: { complete: true }, isArray: true }
}

and then in your controller doing:

// Assuming your todos have been fetched and are stored
// in the $scope.todos variable...
Todo.markAllComplete($scope.todos);

The only thing (and arguably the hardest thing) left to do would be to code your backend to accept a POST to 'api/todo' and mark all the referenced todos as completed.