sometimes crashs with "TypeError: Cannot create property 'statusCode' on...."

[macrozone]

when doing certain requests (currently investigating which one), it sometimes crashes with

/path/to/node_modules/mailchimp-api-v3/index.js:530
 result.statusCode = response.statusCode;

TypeError: Cannot create property 'statusCode' on string '{"members":[{"id":"xxx","email_address":"....."

[prasidhda]

@macrozone , I am also facing this issue once in a while and it forces to stop the docker container too. Did you find the solution to this?

[macrozone]

@macrozone , I am also facing this issue once in a while and it forces to stop the docker container too. Did you find the solution to this?

not yet, i thought it was related to the chunk size, so i lowered the amount of members that i sent to the mailchimp api.

at first i thought it fixed the problem, but that is not the case, it still happens, but unfortunatly not consistently.

I also use meteor so i thought it would be a node-fiber related issue, since the whole thing is in a try-catch but still does not manage to catch this error.

[macrozone]

it seems because it uses the deprecated request package which has bugs on its own

[macrozone]

so here is my conclusion:

• the request package that is used is deprecated and has bugs, it can lead to requests that are not properly finished
• those requests still will end up with a normal success callback in the request package, but the response.body is then a string and not an object
• at this line https://github.com/thorning/node-mailchimp/blob/master/index.js#L530 its expected that the request.body is an object, otherwise it tries to assign a property to a string, which does not work and throws an error
• an error there won't fail the surrounding promise, so you can't catch that.

so here i worked around this problem:

• i patched this package to reject the promise

diff --git a/index.js b/index.js
index 34f9e2ec2b74b78e1e48945fbd307449839ef4d6..f74c3b2d3a2c15e6ba90d2295323a11aac450b4e 100644
--- a/index.js
+++ b/index.js
@@ -527,6 +527,10 @@ Mailchimp.prototype.request = function (options, done) {
       }

       var result = response.body || {};
+      if (typeof result === "string") {
+        reject(new Error("request was cut off"));
+        return;
+      }
       result.statusCode = response.statusCode;

       resolve(result)

that way i can at least handle it gracefully.

i then try to retry the request in my application code. The error happens rarley, so on second attempt it usually works

[prasidhda]

@macrozone , Thanks for the detailed information. I will try to implement your solution.

[macrozone]

if you have the capacity its best to move away from this library as its not maintained anymore and is based on deprecated packages