Curate

Curate makes it easy to quickly expose database queries to an express-api. It also features a client component that makes it easy to consume those API methods.

It works especially well with modella and chino.

Example

configuration

app.js var app = express(), curate = require('curate');

curate.app = app;
curate.namespace = 'api/v1'

exposing server methods

user-model/server.js

  var curate = require('curate'),
      db = require('mong')('localhost/db');

  var User = module.exports = function(attrs) {
    this.username = attrs.username;
    this.password = attrs.password;
    this.email = attrs.email;
  }

  User.allUsers = function(cb) {
    db.get('users').find({}, cb);
  }

  curate('users/all', User.allUsers);

You can now visit http://localhost/api/v1/users and get JSON of the users returned by the User.allUsers query.

consuming the API

Curate also provides easy consumption of the generated API.

user-model/client.js

var curate = require('curate');

var User = module.exports = function() {
}

User.allUsers = curate('users/all', User);

This maps the client-side User.allUsers to hit /api/v1/users/all and use the resulting JSON in a callback. The resulting function has the same fingerprint as the server-side function. It expects a cb(err, results) for its argument.

The second argument passes the JSON returned into a constructor. ie. Instead of passing just JSON in, it will pass the JSON to the constructor to make full-fledged objects.

Filtering results

Sometimes you don't want the raw-db exposed to the client. For this, you can specify the filter method in the app.js

For example:

var app = express(),
    curate = require('curate');

curate.app = app;
curate.filterMethod = 'filter';

Now, if an instance has a method named filter it will call it and only pass the results of that method into the exposed API.