Avoid building json manually

[smesdaghi]

Use the following to convert json objects to string and back as opposed to building them manually such as in getDefaultConfigurationsJSON().
var jsonString = JSON.stringify(myObject)
var jsonObj = JSON.parse(jsonString)

[garnertb]

If this project is using angular, angular.toJson is the preferred method for converting objects to JSON strings, since it will strip out internal angular properties (prefixed by $$).

https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/function/angular.toJson