Middleware: Request-Params handling

[meaku]

Middler offers param parsing, i.e /services/user/:type/:count would extract the params into an object, which is currently not passed on to the alamid-request object.

We should add an params-attribute which will be populated with those params, if defined in middleware.

[jhnns]

Yep. This is a main feature of middler / express.

[meaku]

Param handling works now.

You can call req.getParams to retrieve the params or simply access the req.params attribute.

server.addRoute(["read"], "/services/test/:id*", function(req, res, next) {

    console.log(req.getParams().id);

    //forward to different service
    req.setPath("/services/todo");

    next();

});

There are still many things, that can be improved in the future... It's also important to define all middleware with a slash at the beginning.

[meaku]

It's fine for now, because the API will be stable.

[meaku]

There is a change related to this new feature concerning middleware-definition. I was using the internal sanitized path for route-resolving before and switched to the raw path.

RawPath /services/group/123/members alamid-path -> /services/group/members

alamid expects service-urls to have the following order:

services/ modelURL / modelID / subModelURL / subModelID

The IDs will be removed from the path and stored internally in an IDs object.

We have to use the rawPath for middleware-routing because you might want to define routes, that differ from the pattern above. That's why we need to change the middleware-definition.

Example

Last alamid version

server.addRoute(["create", "update", "destroy"], "/services/group/member*", myMiddleware);

New alamid version

server.addRoute(["create", "update", "destroy"], "/services/group/:groupId/member*", myMiddleware); 

It's maybe slower than before, because middleware will extract the ids as params. But i think it's more readable and easier to customize. But we have to take more care of the raw-path if it's directly passed to middler. We might add some sanitization to the rawPath.

[jhnns]

Yes, it's better, because you don't have to know what alamid does in the background and what alamid expects. It improves readability if the code tells what's going on behind the scenes :wink:

[meaku]

Nice! We'll keep it this way!