xx-server

Install

npm install --save xx-server

Note This is a core package of xerxes, so usually you don't have to install it manually

Usage

In your app.js, put App.load('server/setup'); somewhere at the top. Optionally, but recommended, you can also include App.load('server/validations'); right after the setup (more on that below).

The server uses express, so you're probably already familiar with the syntax. It is exposed through App.router.

App.router.post('/users', function(req, res, next) {
  if (!req.body.email) {
    return next({ status: 422, code: 12345, errors: { email: [ 'email is missing' ] } });
  }
  res.setData({ user: { email: req.body.email } });
  next();
});

After you've defined the routes you have to start the server with App.load('server/start'); This will add a default error handler and 404 handler, so it's important to keep it at the end.

Conventions

One important difference to express is that you shouldn't directly end the request when you're done (with res.json(...) for example). Instead, you set the responseData of the response with res.setData({...}) and let the server figure the rest out by passing it further with next(). This way, other modules can still modify the response when they want to, which is an important key concept of xerxes.

There are also a few recommendations on the json data you return. When you for example return a user object, you should set the responseData to something like { user: { email: "[e-mail]" } } instead of { email: "[e-mail]" }. For endpoints that return lists, you would return { users: [ {...} ], meta: { page: 1, total: 300 } }. Error message should have the format as in the example above.

Nested routes

Let's say you have a module that creates CRUD endpoints on /comments (when doing App.load('comments/endpoints');), but you want them to be in /posts/:post_id/comments instead. Instead of modifying the comments module, you can simply do this:

App.router.push('/posts/:post_id', function() {
  App.load('comments/endpoints');
});

Validations

If you load server/validations, you'll be able to define what the data that gets passed to the endpoints looks like, by defining it through a json schema. Here is an example:

App.router.post('/users', App.router.describe({
  description: "Create a new *user*",
  properties: {
    email: { type: 'string' },
    info: {
      type: 'object',
      properties: { name: { type: 'string' }, birthyear: { type: 'integer' } }
      required: [ 'name' ]
    }
  }
  required: [ 'email', 'info' ]
}), function(req, res, next) {
  ...
});

You can read more about json schema here. This will not only give you validations, but there is the xx-docs package which generates an API documentation from these validations.

Rendering views

Although xerxes is primarily built to create APIs, it's also possible to specify a view with res.setView('index.html'). If the HTTP request accepts html, the server will respond with that html file, but if it's for example application/json then it will send the responseData as json. You can as well use a template engine. For example if you have ejs installed, you can do res.setView('index.ejs');. The data that you pass to res.setData will be used as template variables (locals).