There are occasions when you want to run your AngularJS app without accessing a live REST API. There are various blog posts on the internet about doing this using $httpBackend, which is part of angular-mocks and very handy for unit testing.

For example:

var cakeData = [{ name: 'Hot Cross Bun'}];
$httpBackend.whenGET('/cakes').respond(function(method,url,data) { 
    return [200, cakeData, {}];
});

This is fine if you have small snippets of JSON to return. However, in real life data is usually bigger and uglier than that!

It would seem logical to put your mock data into JSON files, and return these when running without a live backend, keeping the code nice and succinct and readable. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be possible with $httpBackend method.

I tried something like this:

$httpBackend.whenGET('/cakes').respond(function(method, url, data) {
    return $http.get("/mock/cakes.json");
  });

This doesn’t work, because $httpBackend doesn’t work with returned promises. The respond method needs static data.
Workarounds include falling back to a synchronous `XMLHttpRequest` to get the data (ugh) or using a preprocessor to insert the contents of the json file into the code when you build. Neither seem particularly nice.

Using Http Interceptors to serve mock data

I came across this blog post: Data mocking in angular E2E testing, which describes an alternate approach to serving mock data for testing. This approach works just as well for running your app without a backend.

Here’s the code for a simple interceptor

angular.module('mock-backend',[])
    .factory('MockInterceptor', mockInterceptor)
    .config(function ($httpProvider) {
        $httpProvider.interceptors.push("MockInterceptor");
    });

function mockInterceptor() {
    return {
        'request': function (config) {
            if (config.url.indexOf('/cakes') >= 0) {
                config.url = 'mock/cakes.json';
            } 
            return config;
        }
    };
}

It’s fairly easy to use your build script to include this module conditionally when you want to run without a backend.

You can extend the interceptor logic; for example check the method, and switch POST to GET (you can’t POST to a file!). It’s not as sophisticated as a full mock backend, as data doesn’t change to reflect updates, but is a really quick way to view your app with a big chunk of data in it.