Caching a promise object in AngularJS service

Question

I want to implement a dynamic loading of a static resource in AngularJS using Promises. The problem: I have couple components on page which might (or not, depends which are displayed, thus dynamic) need to get a static resource from the server. Once loaded, it can be cached for the whole application life.

I have implemented this mechanism, but I'm new to Angular and Promises, and I want to make sure if this is a right solution \ approach.

var data = null;
var deferredLoadData = null;

function loadDataPromise() {
  if (deferredLoadData !== null)
    return deferredLoadData.promise;

  deferredLoadData = $q.defer();

  $http.get("data.json").then(function (res) {
    data = res.data;
    return deferredLoadData.resolve();
  }, function (res) {
    return deferredLoadData.reject();
  });

  return deferredLoadData.promise;
}

So, only one request is made, and all next calls to loadDataPromise() get back the first made promise. It seems to work for request that in the progress or one that already finished some time ago.

But is it a good solution to cache Promises?

Answer 1

Is this the right approach?

Yes. The use of memoisation on functions that return promises a common technique to avoid the repeated execution of asynchronous (and usually expensive) tasks. The promise makes the caching easy because one does not need to distinguish between ongoing and finished operations, they're both represented as (the same) promise for the result value.

Is this the right solution?

No. That global data variable and the resolution with undefined is not how promises are intended to work. Instead, fulfill the promise with the result data! It also makes coding a lot easier:

var dataPromise = null;

function getData() {
    if (dataPromise == null)
        dataPromise = $http.get("data.json").then(function (res) {
           return res.data;
        });
    return dataPromise;
}

Then, instead of loadDataPromise().then(function() { /* use global */ data }) it is simply getData().then(function(data) { … }).

To further improve the pattern, you might want to hide dataPromise in a closure scope, and notice that you will need a lookup for different promises when getData takes a parameter (like the url).