Consume REST endpoints easier than ever

npm install rest-facade

All you need to do is to instanciate rest.Client with the URL of the endpoint.

const REST = require('rest-facade');

const Users = new REST.Client('http://domain.com/users/:id', options);
const UserVideos = new REST.Client('http://domain.com/users/:userId/videos/:slug');

The getAll() method can take an optional object as first parameters specifying the URL params. Considering the UserVideos model from last example:

const videos = await UserVideos.getAll({ userId: 4 });

console.log(videos.length, 'videos retrieved');

You can also fetch a single instance from the API using get().

const user = await Users.get({ id: 4});

The create method can be called using several signatures.

• create(data) returns a Promise.
• create(urlParams, data) returns a Promise.
• create(data, callback) doesn't return a promise.
• create(urlParams, data, callback) doesn't return a promise.

// POST http://domain.com/users
const user = await Users.create({ firstName: 'John', lastName: 'Doe' });

// POST http://domain.com/users/4/videos
const video = await UserVideos.create({ userId: 4 }, { title: 'Learning Javascript', slug: 'learn-javascript' });

As it was the case with the create() method, delete() can also be called with different signatures.

• delete(urlParams) returns a Promise.
• delete(callback) returns a Promise.
• delete(urlParams, callback) doesn't return a Promise.

// DELETE http://domain.com/users/4
Users.delete({ id: 4 });

// DELETE http://domain.com/users/videos/learn-javascript
UserVideos.delete({ slug: 'learn-javascript' });

There are 2 ways to update data, if you are using correctly the HTTP methods, 1 is PUT and the other one is PATCH, rest-facade supports both of them:Client.update and Client.patch.

As with the previous methods, an object with the URL parameters must be provided as first argument. The second argument must be an object with the new data.

Users.update({ id: userId }, data);

or

Users.put({ id: userId }, data);

Users.patch({ id: userId }, data);

Both functions work exactly the same, the only difference is the method used to perform the request.

In case you don't want to use the all the fancy abstractions (create, update, delete, getAll) you can also send plain HTTP requests using the HTTP method function.

// GET request.
Users.get(qsParams[, cb]);

// POST request.
Users.post(qsParams, data[, cb]);

// PUT request.
Users.put(qsParams, data[, cb]);

// PATCH request.
Users.patch(qsParams, data[, cb]);

// DELETE request.
Users.delete(qsParams[, data, cb]);

All methods support callbacks. However, if a callback function is given no promise will be returned. Callbacks must always be provided after all other function arguments. E.g.:

const users = await Users.getAll();

Users.getAll(function (err, body, headers) {
  // ...
});

All methods accept an object with URL params as first argument. The properties in this object will be used to format the URL as shown above. However, the properties defined in this object, but not in the endpoint URL, will be added as query string params.

N.B. any properties in a given options object whose values are Functions will be ignored with regard to generating the query string.

var Users = new rest.Client('http://domain.com/users/:id');

Users.get({ id: 1 });  // Resolves to http://domain.com/users/1
Users.getAll({ page: 1, pageSize: 10 });  // Resolves to http://domain.com/users?page=1&pageSize=10

There may be some cases when you are working with an API that follows a different naming convention, and it is not really clean to have mixed naming conventions in our code.

// Not good.
Users.getAll({ page: 1, 'page_size': 10 });

You can solve this problem by specifing a naming convention when creating the Rest Client. The naming convention can be any of snakeCase, camelCase, pascalCase, paramCase, or any other implemented by the change-case library.

var Users = rest.Client('http://domain.com/users/:id', { query: { convertCase: 'snakeCase' }});

Users.getAll({ page: 1, pageSize: 10 });  // Will resolve to http://domain.com/users?page=1&page_size=10

By default, arrays in the querystring will be formmated this way: ?a=1&a=2&a=2. However, you can change it to comma separated values ?a=1,2,3 by setting the query.repeatParams option to false.

var client = new rest.Client(url, { query: { repeatParams: false }});

Rest-facade provides options for converting the body of the request/response. So, let's say you are consuming an API implemented in Python (using snake_case) and you want it converted to camelCase. You would specify the following options:

var client = new rest.Client(url, {
  request: {
    body: {
      convertCase: 'snakeCase'
    }
  },
  response: {
    body: {
      convertCase: 'camelCase'
    }
  }
});

Once that's done, you can send any request and the body of it will be converted to snake_case. E.g.

client.create({ firstName: 'John', lastName: 'Doe' });

// The server will receive
// { first_name: 'John', last_name: 'Doe' }

The same way, all the responses from the server will converted to the specified case (camelCase in this example).

Sometimes you need to do some customization to each individual request that is sent to the consumed API, a likely candidate is for adding request-specific headers.

This can be done in two ways:

• defining a function in global options under options.request.customizer
• passing in a options object to a method call that contains a "special" _requestCustomizer property (which should be a function as well!)

You can define both, in which case both will be applied (in the order listed above).

In each case the function is passed the req and params representing the API call in question.

Request customizer functions may be asynchronous. If you require an asynchronous customizer function, use a callback. For example:

customizer(req, params, cb) {
  someAsynchronousFunction
    .then((resultOfYourFunction) => {
      req.set('Authorization', `Bearer ${resultOfYourFunction}`);
      return cb();
    })
    .catch(err => cb(err));
},

Rest-facade has superagent-proxy as peer dependency to add proxy support. To use a proxy, you must first install the peer dependency.

npm install superagent-proxy

If a proxy URI is provided, all requests will be sent through that proxy.

// Rest client that sends all requests through a proxy server.
var client = new rest.Client(url, {
  proxy: 'https://myproxy.com:1234'
});

By default, persistent connection are not enabled. To enabled it, use the option:

var client = new rest.Client(url, {
  keepAlive: true
});

By default the request body type is 'json' but you can specify a custom type as follows:

var client = new rest.Client(url, {
  request: { 
    type: 'form'
  }
});

Valid values are: json and form.