API Provider

serve

Our fundamental change to the basic example is responding with developer-friendly JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data rather than HTML.

Our serve logic is simpler compared to serving HTML.

serve(results) {
	//serve in JSON format
	const res = this.response;
	res.writeHead(statusCodes.OK, jsonType);
	res.end(JSON.stringify(results));
}

JSON Data

This is a human readable JSON response we are providing to the API consumer (populated with example data).

Our data format here is basically just a JavaScript plain object.

More on JSON....

[{"unit":"m","value":2},
{"unit":"ft","value":6.56168},
{"unit":"mm","value":2000},
{"unit":"cm","value":200},
...]

API Key

One other change we'll make to the basic example is adding an API key.

This is a simplified example to show the basic idea -- in reality, we would expand this to support unique keys for each consumer.

authenticate() {
	//check API key
	//simplified authentication to exemplify
	const
		expected = 'Z283794',
		res = this.response;
	if (this.url.query().apiKey !== expected) {
		res.writeHead(statusCodes.BAD_REQUEST, plainType);
		res.end("Invalid API key\n");
		return false;
	}
	return true;
}

Handling Authenticate Failure

If the authenticate fails, we would simply abort the request routing, responding with an error (in this example, "authenticate" will write the error).

processRequest() {
	if (!this.authenticate())
		return;
	this.logRequestInfo();
	this.route();
}

Source Code

Here is the example project source code.

The project will require an npm init, and then npm install of modules: "http-status-codes" and "url-wrapper".