Help me respond

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Thank you for your interest in help-me-respond!

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Your feedback is highly appreciated! 🌸

Prerequisites for usage

Installation

Localization

Pass arguments to your messages

API

Response examples

About

This is a simple response helper which should make your life a bit easier.

It supports localization and friendly messages for users.

Help-me-respond preconfigures HTTP responses for you by setting the status code, processing the message and setting headers. You only need to call one of the API functions and pass the message in a form of a string or an object to it.

Release info

Prerequisites for usage

Your project is a nodejs server based on Express or something similar. Help-me-respond uses the res object from Express, which represents an HTTP response.

Installation

npm i help-me-respond --save

1. Create a config/ folder in the root of your project. That is where all the config for the library lives.

2. Create config/default.json for the general library config

{
  "logging": false,
  "prefixNone": false,  # when you server returns any data, a prefix "data" is added to the response
  "disableJsonHeader": false # remove the default 'application/json' header
  "friendlyMessages": [] # array of message keys which are defined in message.json or locales.json
}

3. Create config/messages.json for the response messages and friendly messages setup.

{
    "welcome": "Welcome to the platform!",
    "notFound": "Unfortunately the given record was not found. Please check your input details."
}

Friendly Messages

Some messages returned from the server are too technical for users. We want to differentiate between those messages and user friendly messages. See example below.

To enable Friendly messages you just need to edit the config/default.json and specify which messages are the friendly ones. The messages itself have to be defined in the config/messages.json (or config/locales.json if you are using localization).

config/default.json

{
    "friendlyMessages": ["welcome", "notFound"]
}

Once the message name is in the above array, the response object will have a key friendlyMessage which makes it easy for front-end to differentiate between messages.

Localization

Sometimes you need to support more than one language.

1. This is a basic setup for the i18n-nodejs.

config/default.json

{
    "lang": "en",
    "langFile": "../../config/locales.json" 
}

lang is the default language of your application

langFile path is used in the library therefore, the path is relative to the index.js file from help-me-respond folder

2. Create config/locales.json file and add some messages there.

config/locales.json

{
    "SHARING_ERROR": {
	"en": "You cannot share the link with yourself."
    },
    "NOT_OWNER": {
	"en": "You are not the owner."
    }
}

Pass arguments to your messages

This works only if you are using localization.

config/locales.json

{
    "welcome": "Welcome dear {{name}}"
}

  http200(res, JSON.stringify({
    msg: 'welcome',
    args: {
      name: 'Mike'
    }
  }))

API

res - Express res object

msg - string message, Error object, any other object

headers - array with http headers. If none provided the only header set by the library will be Content-type: application/json

http400(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 400 error code If no message is specified will return message - BAD REQUEST

http404(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 404 error code If no message is specified will return message - NOT FOUND

http403(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 403 error code If no message is specified will return message - FORBIDDEN

http401(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 403 error code If no message is specified will return message - UNAUTHENTICATED

http200(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 201 success code

http201(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 201 success code

http204(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 204 code

rCode(code, res, msg, headers)

general function to return any HTTP code you want

Response examples

Success messages

{
   "friendlyMessage": "I am a friendly successfull message"
}

{
  "message": "I am a very technical success message that users do not want to see"
}

Error messages

{
  "error": {
    "friendlyMessage": "I am a friendly error message"
  }
}

{
  "error": {
    "message": "I am a very technical error message that users do not want to see",
    "stack": [
      'at /Users/XX/Projects/help-me-respond/test/responseErrorTest.js:28:9',
      'at DUMMY_ERROR_OBJECT (/Users/Dasha/Projects/help-me-respond/test/responseErrorTest.js:27:9)',
      'at Context.<anonymous> (/Users/Dasha/Projects/help-me-respond/test/responseErrorTest.js:72:3)',
      'at callFn (/usr/local/Cellar/node/0.12.7/libexec/npm/lib/node_modules/mocha/lib/runnable.js:334:21)'
    ]    
  }
}

Data response

{
  "data": {
    "item1": "name",
    "item2": "name"
  }
}