Restangular flattening models on post?

Question

Say I have the following form comprising a model and a nested model:

<label>Company Name</label>
<input type="text" ng-model="company.name" />

<label>Owner Name</label>
<input type="text" ng-model="company.owner.name" />

Which I post like this:

Restangular.all('companies').post($scope.company);

What I'm expecting on the server end (in this case Rails) is a nested hash something like this:

company:
    name: Test Company
    owner:
        name: Test Owner

But what I'm getting is this:

name: Test Company
company:
    name: Test Company
owner:
    name: Test Owner

It appears that the models are being flattened, and also the fields from the first model are repeated outside of the scoping.

How can I post the model whilst maintaining its nesting and preferably not repeating the models fields outside of its scope in the hash?

Answer 1

I'm the creator of Restangular.

Could you console.log the output of $scope.company?

Restangular isn't flattering anything. It's just sending the exact JSon that you've provided as a parameter, that's why you should check what is the output of $scope.company.

After that, we can check it further.

Also, have you checked the network tab for the Payload of the request? Is it OK?

Answer 2

I feel the need to clarify this for anyone else finding this question.

Passing $scope.company passes the JS object that is company that does not include the name of the scope variable itself:

{
    name: 'Test Company',
    owner: {
        name: 'Test Owner'
    }
}

The server will see this as a POST variable named name that is a string with value 'Test Company' and another variable named owner that is an array with an index named name with value of 'Test Owner`

In PHP it would be this:

$_POST['name']; // would = 'Test Company'
$_POST['owner']; // would = array('name'=>'Test Owner')

If you want it to be an array of properties on the server side referred to as company then you need to encapsulate $scope.company in a JS object itself with a property titled "company":

$scope.company = {
     company: {
         name : 'Test Company',
         owner : {
             name : 'Test Owner'
         }
     }
};

Now on the server side you'll find this:

$_POST['company']; // would = array('name'=>'Test Company','owner'=>array('name'=>'Test Owner'))