AngularJS : factory $http service

The purpose of moving your studentSessions service out of your controller is to achieve separation of concerns. Your service’s job is to know how to talk with the server and the controller’s job is to translate between view data and server data.

But you are confusing your asynchronous handlers and what is returning what. The controller still needs to tell the service what to do when the data is received later…

studentApp.factory('studentSession', function($http){
    return {
        getSessions: function() {
            return $http.post('/services', { 
                type : 'getSource',
                ID    : 'TP001'
            });
        }
    };
});

studentApp.controller('studentMenu',function($scope, studentSession){
    $scope.variableName = [];

    var handleSuccess = function(data, status) {
        $scope.variableName = data;
        console.log($scope.variableName);
    };

    studentSession.getSessions().success(handleSuccess);
});