angular directive templateUrl should allow "text/html" Accept and content-type headers

[geoidesic]

templateUrl is generally going to be expecting to receive HTML back from the server. To inform the server of that (according to RESTful best practices) it would be useful to be able to specify the headers for the $http request that fetches the actual template.

The default being used by angularJS is "application / json". It would be useful to be able to specify "text/html" instead for templateUrl. In addition I submit that should be the default for any request that expects HTML back from the server.

[caitp]

hmm... well it does make sense. Care to send a PR?

[shawnbissell]

I think the content-type for the templates should be "text/ng-template" so that it matches the mime type already defined for the script directive. https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/directive/script
The problem with using "text/html" is that templates are almost always fragments of html and contain angular specific markup which means they do not validate as HTML and are not renderable in a browser by themselves.

[jammnrose]

I'm actually running into a real use-case with this issue, where it would not only be more correct, but actually useful. The problem that we have is that our server can send back our login page HTML (as text/html) if a user stays on a page for too long before navigating and causing template(s) to be loaded. This results in the login page being injected where the template should be. The way we're going to work around it is with an http interceptor, setting the Accept header to text/ng-template conditionally for our template requests (based on our URL patterns). Our server can then return an appropriate HTTP/415 status code if it can't serve the template.

I think that for directives and routes it could be useful, as discussed, to allow the setting of HTTP headers, and probably at least setting a default value for Accept of text/ng-template.

@shawnbissell completely agree. Was just discussing this with a co-worker. It's definitely wrong to be serving templates as text/html, as they are just HTML fragments.

@dmoscrop per http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648 "X-" based headers are now deprecated. Basically, as long as you choose a sufficiently unique and meaningful mime type, you're free to invent your own.

[dougmoscrop]

@jammnrose retracted! good to know

[giosh94mhz]

👍 faced the same issue.

[toninofox]

Same Issue following the REST Convention.
Adding .html as suffix of the templateUrl parameter it works but it is a little bit confusing to understand that it is a endpoint...