Consuming a Public API

URL

As before, the most important thing is the URL.

The URL we'll use to get forecast data is shown below. You would replace YOUR-API-KEY with your actual API key.

http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?id=5019335&units=imperial&appid=YOUR-API-KEY,

Use API Result

This is the only change we need to make to our existing logic.

Because we have a different API result data set, we need to access it differently.

We'll often need to tinker here with param "result" (unless public API gives us very clear spec). You could start off replacing method body here with just "log(result);". That will allow you to see the entire result and you can then drill into it, like we do here e.g., "result.list".

static showApiResult(result) {
	const list = result.list;
	const main = list[0].main;
	const temperature = main.temp;
	for (var key of Object.keys(main))
		log(key + ': ' + main[key]);
}

Output

After running the node app in the normal way, we should see output similar to this.

This is an elementary example, but gives us an idea of how to write an API consumer.

temp: 60.76
feels_like: 59.88
temp_min: 60.76
temp_max: 61.23
pressure: 995
sea_level: 995
grnd_level: 965
humidity: 71
temp_kf: -0.26

Source Code

Here is the example project source code.

The project will not require npm init nor npm install.