Why does AngularJS $http .success promise work but .then doesn't? - ajax

Question

I've been using the following code for doing ajax calls in Angular which worked fine so far:
function getData (url) {
var deferred = $q.defer();
$http.get(url, {
cache: true
}).success(function (data) {
deferred.resolve(data); // works
});
return deferred.promise;
}
As you can see there is only a success handler. When I wanted to add an error handler, I noticed that the docs state that success and error were depracated and should not be used any more (https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/service/$http). Instead the .then promise should be used, so I changed my code to this:
function getData (url) {
var deferred = $q.defer();
$http.get(url, {
cache: true
}).then(function (data) {
deferred.resolve(data); // Not called :(
}, function () {
deferred.resolve(false); // Not called :(
});
return deferred.promise;
}
Now everything stopped working. .then is never called. Why? I'm on latest Angular version 1.4

Answer 1

Ok, I found the problem. Actually, there were two problems.
First, I had a redundant promise which I removed:
function getData (url) {
return $http.get(url, {cache: true});
}
Second, the returned data from .then seems to be a little different from .success. Instead of returning the plain result data, it returns an object with some meta data from the call. So, in order to get the data, I'd have to access data.data:
pub.getList = function () {
return getData(serviceurl + "?c=latest").then(function (result) {
var list = result.data;
precacheArticles(list);
return list;
});
};