I considered that, but the problem is that fakeServer makes the same response to all requests. Generally speaking, my tests are switching pages and hence need different responses per request. I also need to specify the contentType (although I suppose we could assume that all object responses are going to be JSON). 

I liked introducing this method as it is concise and I thought easier to read than manipulating the requests directly. However, I now have another intermediate method in paging_spec.js, so the readability of the calls is less of an issue.