Nice Request

nice-request is a promise based library to facilitate service to service communication. It makes use of a singleton pattern and exposes two methods as a part of it's API, setup and request. Additionally, data is logged off of failed responses to enable better metrics for API and system performance.

Installation

Run this command in a terminal session to add nice-request to your project:

npm install nice-request --save

API

• setup()

The setup method should be invoked when the express server is initialized with these arguments:

• logger: a object with .info() function for logging
• projectTag: a string used for constructing the metrics tag (ex. dev.monto-user)

const Logger = require('some-logger')
const niceRequest = require('nice-request');

const logger = new Logger();

niceRequest.setup('project tag', logger);

• request()

The request method is to be used to make HTTP requests. It accepts one argument, a configuration object, to set the details for the outbound request. Successful requests will result in a fulfilled promise with the value of the response.body. Failed requests will result in a rejected promise with a nice error.

const niceRequest = require('nice-request');

niceRequest.request({
    url: `http://some-api/users`, // desired resource
    method: 'GET', // desired http method
    metricTag: 'get_account', // string - tag to identify the request in the log (ex. 'create_user')
  })
  .then(result => {});

Optional object properties:

• headers: object - additional http headers specific to the request.
• body: object - req data
• queryString: object -
• timeout: number - override timeout(ms). Default timeout is 25000 ms.
• resolveWithFullResponse: boolean - true resolve with full response (including headers) instead of just body
• rejectUnauthorized: boolean - ignore SSL certificate errors (i.e. self-signed certs)
• maxTries: integer - integer specifying the maximum number of retry attempts.
• errCond: function - function that accepts an error object for evaluation and returns a boolean indicating if the request should be retried or not

Responses

The niceRequest.request(options) function is implemented to return the response body of the request as a JSON object. Please note that headers and http properties are not available in the response body. It is assumed that the http status code is 200 if the requests fulfills.

Error Handling

NiceErrors, and request-promise errors will be returned to the callee with a newly created NiceError.

Timeouts

Nice requests will timeout by default after 25 seconds or at the specified time in the requestOptions object if no response is sent back before that timeframe.