help-me-respond

Help me respond

This is a simple response helper which should make your life a bit easier. It supports localization and friendly messages for users. Help-me-respond preconfigures HTTP responses for you by setting the status code, processing the message and setting headers. You only need to call one of the API functions and pass the message in a form of a string or an object to it.

UPDATES

08.01.2018

The library became lighter! :) I removed config library dependency in order to minimize dependencies, however you can still use it since the config folder structure I am following here is the same as for the node-config;

The library is easier to configure. No need to configure anything :) Just start using it!

Localization became optional.

BREAKING CHANGES:

Removed code key from the error response message object. If u were using this, please use the code in the Express HTTP Response object.

Removed http502.

Prerequisites for usage

Your project is a nodejs server based on Express or something similar. Help-me-respond uses the res object from Express, which represents an HTTP response.

Setup

Install with

npm i help-me-respond --save

OPTIONAL: Create config/messages.json file. We don't want our messages to be hardcoded in the code, so we will keep them in a separate file.

{
	"MESSAGE_NAME1": "Very long and important message text.",
    "MESSAGE_NAME2": "Very long and important message text2."  
}

Configuration

All the configurations are put in config/ folder in the root of your project.

User friendly messages

Some messages returned from the server are too technical for users. So we would like to differentiate between those messages and user friendly messages. See example below. You can use it for messages in messages.json or locales.json

config/messages.json

{
  "messageOne": "This is the first message",
  "messageTwo": "This is the second message"
}

config/default.json

{
	"friendlyMessages": ["messageOne", "messageTwo"]
}

Once the message name is in the above array, the response will have a key friendlyMessage which makes it easy for front-end to differentiate between messages.

Localization

You will need to add the following to your config/default.json file. This is a basic setup for the i18n-nodejs - https://github.com/eslam-mahmoud/i18n-nodejs

{
	"lang": "en",
	"langFile": "../../config/locales.json"
}

langFile path is used in the library therefore, the path is relative to the index.js file from help-me-respond folder

• Create the specified above locales folder and locales file and add some messages there.

{
	"SHARING_ERROR": {
		"en": "You cannot share the link with yourself."
	},
	"NOT_OWNER": {
		"en": "You are not the owner."
	}
}

Pass arguments to your messages

This works only if you are using localization.

config/locales.json

{
  "welcome": "Welcome dear {{name}}",
}

somewhere in the code

http200(res, JSON.stringify({
  msg: 'welcome',
  args: {
    name: 'Mike'
  }
}));

Turn off data prefix

When you server returns any data, a prefix data is added to response.

You can turn it off by setting prefixNone to true in your config file. For more info about config see Config setup above.

Turn off default 'application/json' header

Remove the default application/json header by setting disableJsonHeader to true in your config file. For more info about config see Config setup above.

API

res - Express res object

msg - string message, Error object, any other object

headers - array with http headers. If none provided the only header set by the library will be Content-type: application/json

http400(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 400 error code If no message is specified will return message - BAD REQUEST

http404(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 404 error code If no message is specified will return message - NOT FOUND

http403(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 403 error code If no message is specified will return message - FORBIDDEN

http401(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 403 error code If no message is specified will return message - UNAUTHENTICATED

http200(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 201 success code

http201(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 201 success code

http204(res, msg, headers)

returns HTTP response with 204 code

rCode(code, res, msg, headers)

general function to return any HTTP code you want

Response examples

Success messages

{
   "friendlyMessage": "I am a friendly successfull message"
}

{
  "message": "I am a very technical success message that users do not want to see"
}

Error messages

{
  "error": {
    "friendlyMessage": "I am a friendly error message"
  }
}

{
  "code": 400,
  "error": {
    "message": "I am a very technical error message that users do not want to see",
    "stack": [
      'at /Users/XX/Projects/help-me-respond/test/responseErrorTest.js:28:9',
      'at DUMMY_ERROR_OBJECT (/Users/Dasha/Projects/help-me-respond/test/responseErrorTest.js:27:9)',
      'at Context.<anonymous> (/Users/Dasha/Projects/help-me-respond/test/responseErrorTest.js:72:3)',
      'at callFn (/usr/local/Cellar/node/0.12.7/libexec/npm/lib/node_modules/mocha/lib/runnable.js:334:21)'
    ]    
  }
}

Data response

{
  "data": {
    "item1": "name",
    "item2": "name"
  }
}