Clean and Consistent Express.js Controllers – Enterprise Node.js and TypeScript

This article is part of the Enterprise Node.js + TypeScript series .

Express.js is my favourite web framework to use with Node.js for building out the RESTful APIs on my backend applications.

One of the reasons why Express.js is so popular is because it's minimal and allows you to get up and running quickly with pretty much 0 boilerplate code.

Because there's a lack of opinion around how Express.js controllers and routes should be setup, it's easy to end up writing code that's not very DRY and not very consistent.

Not only is it important to keep our code DRY to prevent introducing bugs, but we should aim to keep our API responses consistent. The best developer experiences working with RESTful APIs (think Stripe's API ) original from clear and consistent RESTful responses.

Right off the bat, I can think of two ways that we can increase the stability/structure of our responses:

1. Use Data Transmission Objects (DTOs) to compose a contract for the structure of the response objects (consistent data contracts).
2. Use a BaseController to encapsulate all responses for all concrete controllers.

We'll cover #2 in this article and revisit #1 in a separate one.

Creating a BaseController

We want to create some sort of BaseController that represents all of the functionality that a controller can accomplish, from one place.

For example, every controller should be able to:

• take in a request and a response
• return a 200 with a response payload / dto
• return a 200/201 without a response payload / dto
• return a 400 error
• return a 500 error

To encapsulate all of this functionality, we can use an abstract class.

import * as express from 'express'

export abstract class BaseController {
  abstract execute (req: express.Request, res: express.Response): void;

  public static jsonResponse (res: express.Response, code: number, message: string) {
    return res.status(code).json({ message })
  }

  public ok<T> (res: express.Response, dto?: T) {
    if (!!dto) {
      return res.status(200).json(dto);
    } else {
      return res.sendStatus(200);
    }
  }

  public created (res: express.Response) {
    return res.sendStatus(201);
  }

  public clientError (res: express.Response, message?: string) {
    return BaseController.jsonResponse(res, 400, message ? message : 'Unauthorized');
  }

  public unauthorized (res: express.Response, message?: string) {
    return BaseController.jsonResponse(res, 401, message ? message : 'Unauthorized');
  }

  public paymentRequired (res: express.Response, message?: string) {
    return BaseController.jsonResponse(res, 402, message ? message : 'Payment required');
  }

  public forbidden (res: express.Response, message?: string) {
    return BaseController.jsonResponse(res, 403, message ? message : 'Forbidden');
  }

  public notFound (res: express.Response, message?: string) {
    return BaseController.jsonResponse(res, 404, message ? message : 'Not found');
  }

  public conflict (res: express.Response, message?: string) {
    return BaseController.jsonResponse(res, 409, message ? message : 'Conflict');
  }

  public tooMany (res: express.Response, message?: string) {
    return BaseController.jsonResponse(res, 429, message ? message : 'Too many requests');
  }

  public fail (res: express.Response, error: Error | string) {
    return res.status(500).json({
      message: error.toString()
    })
  }
}

Implementing a controller

Let's take the basic example of creating a User that requires a valid password , username and email .

Starting a simple controller to create a user might begin looking like this.

class CreateUserController extends BaseController {
  public execute (req: express.Request, res: express.Response): void {
    try {
      // ... Handle request by creating objects
 
    } catch (err) {
      return this.fail(res, err.toString())
    }
  }
}

Also, check out that nice auto-completion and all the methods we now have available that we no longer have to manually implement!

Implementing the abstract method

When we extend an abstract class, if the abstract class had any abstract methods on it, we would need to implement those in the subclass.

Observe that we've implemented it in this CreateUserController . If you'll recall in the BaseController , it had a single abstract method :

// Abstract method from the CreateUserController 
abstract execute (req: express.Request, res: express.Response): void;

Let's continue with implementing the controller.

Validating the request payload

Let's continue by utilizing theValue Objects to validate that the username , password and email coming in hot off the wire from the internet are valid.

class CreateUserController extends BaseController {
  public execute (req: express.Request, res: express.Response): void {
    try {
      const { username, password, email } = req.body;
      const usernameOrError: Result<Username> = Username.create(username);
      const passwordOrError: Result<Password> = Password.create(password);
      const emailOrError: Result<Email> = Email.create(email);

      const result = Result.combine([ 
        usernameOrError, passwordOrError, emailOrError 
      ]);

      if (result.isFailure) {
        // Send back a 400 client error
        return this.clientError(res, result.error);
      }

      // ... continue

    } catch (err) {
      return this.fail(res, err.toString())
    }
  }
}

If you've been following with theDomain Driven-Design articles I've been writing, you'll recall that this is my preferred approach of delegating the responsibility of validating objects.

From within any of these Value Object classes, you can use a combination of Joi validators , custom validation methods and anything else you like in order to ensure that the value objectinvariants are satisfied.

However you might be seeing something new here.

Result class

And that something is the usage of a Result class. Stay tuned for an upcoming article on that.

For now, it's sufficient to understand that the Result class is a cleaner way to handle errors rather than throwing errors explicitly. It also allows us to combine(Result[]?) s together in order and will return the first of the provided array of Results that is invalid.

This in turn helps to pass back really helpful contextual error messages to the client consuming this API.

Finishing it up

In order to finish off this API request, we'll want to persist the User to persistence.

To do that, we'll ensure that we utilize Depdendency Inversion to specify that this class depends on an IUserRepo .

class CreateUserController extends BaseController {
  private userRepo: IUserRepo;

  constructor (userRepo: IUserRepo) {
    this.userRepo = userRepo;
  }

  public execute (req: express.Request, res: express.Response): void {
    try {
      const { username, password, email } = req.body;
      const usernameOrError: Result<Username> = Username.create(username);
      const passwordOrError: Result<Password> = Password.create(password);
      const emailOrError: Result<Email> = Email.create(email);

      const result = Result.combine([ 
        usernameOrError, passwordOrError, emailOrError 
      ]);

      if (result.isFailure) {
        // Send back a 400 client error
        return this.clientError(res, result.error);
      }

      // ... continue
      const userOrError: Result<User> = User.create({
        username: usernameOrError.getValue(),
        password: passwordOrError.getValue(),
        email: emailOrError.getValue()
      });

      if (userOrError.isFailure) {
        // Send back a 400 client error
        return this.clientError(res, result.error);
      }

      const user: User = userOrError.getValue();

      // Create the user
      await this.userRepo.createUser(user);

      // Return a 200
      return this.ok<any>(res);

    } catch (err) {
      return this.fail(res, err.toString())
    }
  }
}

That's it!

Now you know my preferred way to create Express.js controllers by encapsulating all of the common functionality in an abstract class.

This type of thing is also possible to do without TypeScript but it's requires a little bit more trickery in order to implement the design patterns and principles we've mentioned in this article.

If you're still considering whether you want to use TypeScript, check outmy definitive guide on whether it makes sense for your next project.