Problem

Sometimes REST servers want traditional "x-www-form"- urlencoded data in any requests, which looks like:

first=bonjour&second=salut

However Restangular, like any good REST frameworks will send natively the data in JSON. I had hard time to understand how I could send my data with Restangular. Note: Jquery is sending urlencoded data natively:

var data = {
     "first": "bonjour",
     "second": "salut"
};

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: 'http://myre.ch',
    data: data,
    success: function() {
        //...
    }
});

Solution

The first component that will help us is $.param. It will serialize our object into a string following the urlencode pattern.

var date_encoded = $.param(data); // = "first=bonjour&second=salut"

And here comes the trick. It does not appear in Restangular documentation, but .customPOST([elem, path, params, headers]) will post whatever data you pass into elem, i.e. you can set elem to be a string and it will be included into the request body. So the rest is a matter of putting the right parameters and voila, you are sending data url-encoded:

Restangular.oneUrl('myre', 'http://myre.ch'
.customPOST(
    date_encoded, 
    undefined, // put your path here
    undefined, // params here, e.g. {format: "json"}
    {'Content-Type': "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8"}
);

Reason

Why not using the jquery solution? Well, because Restangular has all theses awesome features... and especially because in many cases you will need the promises that give you Restangular right out of the box. To do a promise request with jquery it's twice more code.