HTTP 406 Error When Using Angular $http.get Against SharePoint REST End Points

Update: Marc AD ndersson pointed out this great piece of info: http://blogs.office.com/2014/08/13/json-light-support-rest-sharepoint-api-released/.  That explains a lot :).

That may be the worst title of a blog post ever!  Anyhoo.

I typically do all of my prototyping against an O365 instance.  I have my personal instance so that I don’t have to be worried about affecting anyone else.  As an aside – remember when we call carried around virtual machines on our laptops with MOSS – SQL Server, IIS, deciding Hyper-V vs. VMWare?  Anyhoo…

I had developed an app using Angular in this environment that does, among other things, this:

$http.get(serverUrl)
.success(function(data, status, headers, config) {

    var getLinksResponse = data;

    getLinksResponse.value.forEach(function(theResult) {

    // and so on and so froth

This was working just fine in two different SharePoint online environments.  However, when my colleague ported it to a Cloudshare instance, he was getting an HTTP 406 error (which was the first time I ever got that one, so … yay, I guess).  We did a bit of research and noticed that the “Accept” header was off.  SharePoint online was perfectly happy with:

Accept: application/json

But the cloudshare instance (which is SP on prem, hosted in a virtual server) wanted the classic “odata=verbose” added in as well:

Accept: application/json;odata=verbose

To fix that, we added the header as such:

var config = {headers: {
‘Accept’: ‘application/json;odata=verbose’
}
};

$http.get(serverUrl,config)
.success(function(data, status, headers, config) {

  var getLinksResponse = data;

  getLinksResponse.value.forEach(function(theResult) {

  // and so on and so froth

That got rid of the 406, but it also changed the format of the response.  It was more … verbose.  (haha!)  More changes were required and here’s the final result:

var config = {headers: {
‘Accept’: ‘application/json;odata=verbose’
}
};

$http.get(serverUrl,config)
.success(function(data, status, headers, config) {

  var getLinksResponse = data;

  getLinksResponse.d.results.forEach(function(theResult) {

  // and so on and so froth

This only turned into a 30 minute problem for us, so we lucked out.  Hopefully someone finds this useful.

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