Subscribing to a nested Observable

Question

I have an app that makes one http request to get a list of items and then makes an http request for each item in the list to get more detailed information about each item.

Answer 1

I'd do it like the following:

function mockRequest() {
    return Observable.of('[{"id": 1}, {"id": 2}, {"id": 3}]');
}
function otherMockRequest(id) {
    return Observable.of(`{"id":${id}, "desc": "description ${id}"}`);
}

class ItemsService {
    fetchItems() {
        return mockRequest()
            .map(res => JSON.parse(res))
            .concatAll()
            .mergeMap(item => this.fetchItem(item));
    }

    fetchItem(item: Item) {
        return otherMockRequest(item.id)
            .map(res => JSON.parse(res));
    }
}

let service = new ItemsService();
service.fetchItems().subscribe(val => console.log(val));

See live demo: http://plnkr.co/edit/LPXfqxVsI6Ja2J7RpDYl?p=preview

I'm using a trick with .concatAll() to convert an array of Objects such as [{"id": 1}, {"id": 2}, {"id": 3}] into separate values emitted one by one {"id": 1}, {"id": 2} and {"id": 3} (as of now it's an undocumented feature). Then I use mergeMap() to fetch their content in a separate request and merge it's result into the operator chain.

This plnkr example prints to console:

{ id: 1, desc: 'description 1' }
{ id: 2, desc: 'description 2' }
{ id: 3, desc: 'description 3' }