How can I get access to the Angular 2 http response body without converting it to string or json?

Question

I would like to copy a REST response into a blob but I am unable to do some because blob() and arrayBuffer() have not yet been implemented in the Response Object. The Response Body is a private variable.

...
return this.http.get(url, {params: params, headers: headers})
     .map(res => {   
        // can't access _body because it is private
        // no method appears to exist to get to the _body without modification             
        new Blob([res._body], {type: res.headers.get('Content-Type')});
     })
     .catch(this.log);
...

Is there a solution I can use until these methods get implemented?

Solution 1

There's a much simpler solution to accessing the body as a string which I haven't seen documented anywhere:

let body = res.text()

Solution 2

Addon to @StudioLE. You may use json() method to return data as json.

let body = res.json()

Solution 3

Since I found this question while running into the same problem (and Angular's documentation is not updated as of today) you can now use:

let blob = new Blob([response.arrayBuffer()], { type: contentType });

Another workaround if you for some reason are on an old version of Angular 2 is:

let blob = new Blob([(<any> response)._body], { type: contentType });

Solution 4

set the responseType of requestoptions. That will make the response.blob() method work.

let headers = this.getAuthorizationHeader();
headers.append("Accept", "application/octet-stream");
return this.http
    .get(url, new RequestOptions({ headers: headers, responseType: ResponseContentType.Blob }))
    .map((res: Response): Blob => {
        return res.ok ? res.blob() : undefined;
    });

Solution 5

I can't see no other solutions before the following PR is merged:

• https://github.com/angular/angular/pull/7260

Whereas you have a compilation error, the field can be used at runtime...

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