$q.reject()

Creates a promise that is resolved as rejected with the specified reason. This api should be used to forward rejection in a chain of promises. If you are dealing with the last promise in a promise chain, you don't need to worry about it.

When comparing deferreds/promises to the familiar behavior of try/catch/throw, think of reject as the throw keyword in JavaScript. This also means that if you "catch" an error via a promise error callback and you want to forward the error to the promise derived from the current promise, you have to "rethrow" the error by returning a rejection constructed via reject.

promiseB = promiseA.then(function(result) {
  // success: do something and resolve promiseB
  //          with the old or a new result
  return result;
}, function(reason) {
  // error: handle the error if possible and
  //        resolve promiseB with newPromiseOrValue,
  //        otherwise forward the rejection to promiseB
  if (canHandle(reason)) {
   // handle the error and recover
   return newPromiseOrValue;
  }
  return $q.reject(reason);
});