I encountered this pattern in the book 'Mean Machine'.
Until now, I thought you always return a promise from a service (to a controller), then you deal with .success or .then in your controller.
Here, the author is returning the returned data from the promise.
Is this common? Is it recommended practice?
  .factory('Auth', function($http, $q, AuthToken) {
        var authFactory = {};
        authFactory.login = function(username, password) {
            return
                $http
                    .post('/api/authenticate', {
                        username: username,
                        password: password
                    })
                    .success(function(data) {
                        AuthToken.setToken(data.token);
                        return data;
                    });
        };
        ...
 
     
    