Service Basics

• Services

  • Service Parameters and Middleware

  • Mounting Services

• Next Up...

Services

One of the main concepts within Angel, which is borrowed from FeathersJS, is a service. You more than likely have already dealt with another implementation of the service concept. In Angel, a service is a class that acts as a Web interface and exposes CRUD actions operating on a set of data. Angel services extend Routable, and thus can be mounted on a certain path and become REST endpoints.

The Angel core includes the Service base class, as well as two in-memory service classes. Database adapter packages, such as package:angel_mongo include service classes that let you interact with a database without writing complex code yourself.

Services can also be filtered or reacted to with service hooks.

A service looks like this:

class MyService extends Service {
  // GET /
  // Fetch all resources. Usually returns a List.
  @override
  Future index([Map params]);

  // GET /:id
  // Fetch one resource, by its ID
  @override
  Future read(id, [Map params]);

  // POST /
  // Create a resource. This endpoint should return
  // the created resource.
  @override
  Future create(data, [Map params]);

  // PATCH /:id
  // Modifies a resource. Clients can submit only the data
  // they want to change, and the corresponding resource will
  // have only those fields changed. This endpoint should return
  // the modified resource.
  @override
  Future modify(id, data, [Map params]);

  // POST /:id
  // Overwrites a resource. The existing resource is completely
  // replaced by the new data. This endpoint should return the
  // new resource.
  @override 
  Future update(id, data, [Map params]);

  // DELETE /:id
  // Deletes a resource. This endpoint should return the
  // deleted resource.
  @override
  Future remove(id, [Map params]);
}

Service Parameters and Middleware

You might notice that each service method accepts an optional Map of parameters. When accessed via HTTP (i.e., not over Websockets), req.query or req.body is passed here (query for index, read and delete, body for create, update and modify). To pass custom parameters to a service, you should create a middleware to do so. @Middleware annotations can be prepended to service classes or service methods. For example, the following will pass foo='bar' to every method in the service:

Future<bool> myMiddleware(RequestContext req, res) async {
  req.query['foo'] = 'bar';
  return true;
}

@Middleware(const [myMiddleware])
class MyService extends Service {
  // Responds with "['bar']"
  @override index([Map params]) async => [params['query']['foo']];
}

Additionally, when accessed by a client, params will contain a field called provider.

class MyService extends Service {
  @override
  create(data, [Map params]) async {
    if (params == null || params['provider'] == null) {
       // Accessed via server
    }
  }
}

provider will be a Providers class, whose String via will tell you where the service is being accessed from, i.e. 'rest' or 'websocket'.

Mounting Services

As mentioned above, services extend Routable, so you can simply app.use() them. You can also supplement them with additional routes or middleware, placed before the mounting of a service:

app.get("/user/:id/todos", (id) => fetchUserTodos(id)));

// Another way to apply a middleware to a service
app.all("/user/*", 'some middleware', middleware: ['some', 'more', 'middleware']);

app.use('/user', new TypedService<User>(new MongoService(db.collection("users"))));

// Make a service global without exposing it to REST
app.services['secret'] = new SecretService();

// Access app services. Returns a HookedService if there is one, otherwise just the plain service.
// Leading and trailing slashes are ignored.
var service = app.service('user'); // The user service
var service = app.service('secret'); // Not exposed to REST, but can still be used easily

Next Up...

Reflectively serialize and deserialize data within services by wrapping them in a TypedService.