Javascript Angular: how to chain unknown number of promises

If you would need to do requests sequentially, you would create a promise which you could use as the head of your chain. Then, you could chain $http calls up to that head and resolve the head promise:

aService.factory('seq', function($http, $q){
    // Dummy resources.
    var resources = [   
      'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js',
      'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js',
      'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js'
    ];
    var deferred = $q.defer();
    var resourcePromise = deferred.promise;
    var res = [];
    angular.forEach(resources, function(resource){
      return resourcePromise.then(function(){
        return $http({ method: 'GET', url: resource });
      }).then(function(data){
        res.push({res: resource, data : data});
      });
    });

    deferred.resolve();

    return {
        getResource: resourcePromise.then(function(){
          return res;
        })
    };
});

but if requests would be in parallel - then it would be simplier solution. Just array of promises and simply call $q.all function for waiting to resolve all promises.

aService.factory('par', function($http, $q){
    // Dummy resources.
    var resources = [   
      'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js',
      'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js',
      'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js'
    ];
    var promises = [];
    var res = [];
    angular.forEach(resources, function(resource){
      promises.push(
        $http({ method: 'GET', url: resource }).then(
          function(data){
            res.push({res: resource, data : data});
          })
        );
    });

    return {
        getResource: $q.all(promises).then(function(){
          return res;
        })
    };
});

Also note that in both cases we have res array for collecting results of requests.

EDIT: Plunker with example

You can indeed do this with reduce:

var chain = resources.reduce(function (sourcesPromise, url) {
    return sourcesPromise.then(function (sources) {
        return $http({method: 'GET', url: url})
        .then(function (data) {
            sources.push({url: url, source: data});

            return sources;
        });
    });
}, $q.when([]));

chain.then(function (sources) {
    // [{url, source}, ...]
});

based on How to chain a variable number of promises in Q, in order?