catapult

Catapult is a Web API abstraction tool. The aim of this package is to simplify adding data endpoints to a NodeJS application/server. The generated API endpoints follow RFC 7231. Here is a quick guide of how this works :

For the following example to work, you must have MongoDB running.

Import package

var catapult = require("catapult_edm")

Setup Components

Initialize the RouteMapper and pass the Mongoose Connector provided with the package :

var RouteMapper = new catapult.RouteMapper(
	catapult.MongooseConnector
)

Now add a few Mongoose models to access through REST API

const mongoose = require('mongoose');
mongoose.connect(
    'mongodb://localhost:27017/test', {
        useNewUrlParser: true,
        useUnifiedTopology: true
    }
);

var Pet = { 
	name: String 
}

// resource name will be `cats`
const Cat = mongoose.model('Cat', Pet );

const Dog = mongoose.model('Dog', Pet );

models = {
	Cat,
	Dog
}

Generate API

Add the models to the route mapper.

RouteMapper.add(models.Cat, models.Dog)
var router = RouteMapper.getRouter()

Mount a path for your new endpoints

app.use("/",router)

Web Interface

Once the route mapper is configured and linked to your express server, you can access your data with the following request combinations. Keep in mind that <model name> is the API resource name your data connector returns. The table below will assume that your router is mounted at server root. In Mongoose land, <object id> is the string representation of field _id within your MongoDB object.

Request Verb Registered Express Path Request Body Result POST /<model name> JSON string of object to add. { "name" : "Fluffo" } with the models defined above in mind Newly created object. As a json string. GET /<model name>?query=val N/A A list of objects. Query parameters are optional, but can be used to filter results based on a passed string value. PUT /<model name>/<object id> JSON string with object updates JSON object with success message. GET /<model name>/<object id> N/A JSON object with the ID of the requested object. null is returned if the object is not found. GET /<model name>/find?query=val N/A Find an individual record based on query supplied. DELETE /<model name>/<object id> N/A JSON object with success message, otherwise null

Sample commands with curl:

Get all cats :

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:3000/cats'

Add a new cat record :

curl -XPOST -H "Content-type: application/json" -d '{ "name" : "Fluffo" }' 'http://localhost:3000/cats'

Update a cat record :

curl -XPUT -H "Content-type: application/json" -d '{ "name" : "Fluff" }' 'http://localhost:3000/cats/608d41ca30f954cbf1d11170'

See the full example under test/server.js within this repository.