Unable to get result of asynchronous call in the controller $scope - angularjs

Question

I was trying to improve the code in my application by moving the RESTful call in my angularJS to a factory like so:
In app.js
var myApp = angular.module('myApp', ['ngRoute','ngResource']);
In services.js
swof.factory('engineerService', function($resource)
{
var data = $resource('/api/engineers/:empid',{empid: "#empid"},
{
'get':
{ method:'GET'},
'save':
{method:'POST'},
'query':
{method:'GET',
transformResponse: function(data)
{
return angular.fromJson(data);
},
isArray:true},
'remove':
{method:'DELETE'},
'delete':
{method:'DELETE'}
});
return data;
});
In controller.js
engineerService.query().$promise.then(function(data)
{
$scope.engineers = data;
typeof $scope.engineers;
console.log("[in]", $scope.engineers);
$scope.$apply;
});
console.log("[out]", $scope.engineers);
The controller is referenced in the engineer.html page and the idea is that it will display a list of engineers from $scope.engineer.
The output in the Chrome console is as follows:
For some reason I am unable to get the data returned from the REST query to appear outside of the section of the controller with the $promise.
Can someone please help me with this?

Answer 1

Here is the solution. First of all the services part:
swof.factory('engineerService', function($resource)
{
var data = $resource('/api/engineers/:empid',{empid: "#empid"},
{
'get':
{ method:'GET'},
'save':
{method:'POST'},
'query':
{method:'GET',
transformResponse: function(data)
{
return angular.fromJson(data);
},
isArray:true},
'remove':
{method:'DELETE'},
'delete':
{method:'DELETE'}
});
return data;
});
Now for the controller:
swof.controller('engineerController', ['$scope', '$log', '$http', 'engSchedService', 'engineerService', function($scope, $log, $http, engSchedService, engineerService ) {
engineerService.query().$promise.then(function(data)
{
$scope.engineers = data;
});
}]);
The values in $scope.engineers was accessed in html using ngrepeat as follows:
<tbody ng-repeat="engineer in (filtered = (engineers | filter: query | filter: searchKeyword | orderBy: orderByField:reverseSort))">
Big thanks to everyone who contributed to help me with this. G