Can AngularJS set the responseType after a response has been received?

Question

I have an Angular 1.x application that is expecting to receive a binary file download (pdf) using a $http.post() call. The problem is, I\'d like to alternative

Answer 1

An XHR responseType property can not be changed after a response has been loaded. But an arraybuffer can be decoded and parsed depending on Content-Type:

 var config = {
    responseType: "arraybuffer",
    transformResponse: jsonBufferToObject,
  };

  function jsonBufferToObject (data, headersGetter, status) {
      var type = headersGetter("Content-Type");
      if (!type.startsWith("application/json")) {
        return data;
      };
      var decoder = new TextDecoder("utf-8");
      var domString = decoder.decode(data);
      var json = JSON.parse(domString);
      return json;
  };

  $http.get(url, config);

The above example sets the XHR to return an arraybuffer and uses a transformResponse function to detect Content-Type: application/json and convert it if necessary.

The DEMO on PLNKR