fix(ngResource): Add suport for nested params

[cakesifu]

Allow ngResource to properly construct a query string for params which
have objects or arrays as values.

[marknadig]

Just ran into this today and agree it would be great if it worked like jQuery.param method. I am hitting a Rails service and just trying to pass a simple array as a parameter. Note: This PR currently will encode arrays w/ index; e.g.
foo=['bar', 'baz']
is encoded as
foo[0]=bar&foo[1]=baz

parity with jQuery would be
foo[]=bar&foo[]=baz

(by supplying index - Rails parses the parameter into a hash using the index as a key rather than an array). Parity w/ jQuery would exclude the index for array.

[marknadig]

following up - here's the issue related to $http where added ability to encode arrays that Igor referenced:
#1363

I agree keeping it consistent would be best. Actually, has me wondering - why even have this encoding logic in angular-resource's Route.url() ... perhaps a better approach would be Route.url only deals with urlParams and pass along any remaining params on to $http to keep it DRY.

[marknadig]

@IgorMinar I was working on a PR to have resource delegate encoding of params to $http. The code is pretty straight forward and I think is a good change to DRY things up. However, I have one failing test related to this spec: 'should not encode @ in url params' with this comment:
//encodeURIComponent is too agressive and doesn't follow http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt
//with regards to the character set (pchar) allowed in path segments
//so we need this test to make sure that we don't over-encode the params and break stuff like
//buzz api which uses @self

With the encoding of the params handled by http, this test fails which has me wondering why the fix for over aggressive encoding isn't in $http to begin with.

[Phantoms]

It is a much needed (critical, i would say) feature, array serialization to x[]=one&x[]=two.

Also, not sure if related, it is now impossible to set your path to something like "?q=text&x[]=one&x[]=two" at all. It gets changed to "?q=text&x[]=two". Could not yet find the responsible piece of code, though. Happens if $location is injected.

[pkozlowski-opensource]

Since there are different back-ends and encoding schemas maybe the way to move forward would be to add a configurable strategy (on the $httpProvider-level?)

[Phantoms]

Being brought up by php/rails/jquery i always assumed that "?x[]=one&x[]=two" was the only desired serialization approach. And now i'm very confused to find out that there are other approaches, entirely blocking me from using angularjs with rails backend :( I had tremendous fun learning the framework up until this point though.

I've looked into $httpProvider code briefly, but couldn't quite figure how to approach the 'configurable strategy' solution. May i ask for some tips on where to look?

Also, how does $location link into this behavior? I guess i could work around this problem if i could keep $location from mangling the incoming query string.

Would a separate issue for this be more helpful, since i'm not committing any code yet?

[marknadig]

@Phantoms this PR was landed 2a21234 and should provide what you are expecting w/ array serlialization. The fix was to have $resource delegate the encoding to $http which had a separate fix for array serialization. Does that help?

[Phantoms]

I'll give it a try, thanks!
Doesn't it serialize into ?x=one&x=two, though? It is not quite the same as ?x[]=one&x[]=two.

[marknadig]

Andrei, it should serialize as you expect. (I'm also using rails).

[Phantoms]

Thank you so much for your fix, Mark. It does indeed work as expected.
There is one more issue though, probably not directly related.
If you inject $location, and try to enter a path like ?x[]=one&x[]=two&x[]=three, it'll be changed into ?x[]=three. No clue how it works.

[petebacondarwin]

It appears that this functionality has been merged now. Can we close this PR then?

@Phantoms - you mention another issue? If this is still the case, can you create a new issue/PR for it?