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LoopBack 4 October 2020 Milestone Update

· 3 min read
Janny Hou

Originally published on strongloop.com

In October, we were excited to see an increasing number of community contributions as people joined the Hacktoberfest event. This month we had pretty balanced improvements in each area of the framework, including context, health check, OpenAPI specification and documentations. Keep reading to learn about the recently added features!

We welcomed @mrmodise as the maintainer of loopback4-shopping-example. And we'd like to thank everyone @nflaig, @MattiaPrimavera, @mdbetancourt, @mrmodise, @frbuceta, @HrithikMittal, @simlt, @hectorleiva, @pktippa, @VergilSkye, @kerolloz, @arondn2, @mayank-SFIN571 for your contributions in October!

Here are the highlighted improvements:

Context

REST

  • Allowed array query parameter for a single value, like {tags: 'hello'} where parameter tags is a string array. See PR #6542.

  • Supported property level configuration for hidden fields, like @property({type: 'string', hidden: true}) password: string. This is the shortcut for specifying the hidden properties in model settings. See PR #6484.

  • save() method throwing error due to missing idName is fixed in PR #6640.

  • modifySpec() turns to an async function to allow async spec updates. See PR #6655.

Build

  • A force clean rebuild was added to the pre-start script for the LoopBack 4 examples. You can run npm start after removing artifacts without manually cleaning the /dist files. See PR #6588.

  • Turned on exit for mocha tests for the created LoopBack applications. See PR #6475.

Extensions

  • Module @loopback/socketio was added to use socket.io to expose controllers as WebSocket friendly endpoints.

  • Enable/disable the metrics endpoints in explorer when mounting the metric and health extensions. See PR #6646 and PR #6645.

  • Only add MetricsObserver, MetricsPushObserver and expose /metrics endpoints when they are enabled. See PR #6644.

  • The health check for applications running in container now returns a more accurate HTTP status code based on the state. For example, checking /health for application in states 'STARTING', 'STOPPING' or 'STOPPED' returns 503. You can find more details in PR #6648.

Documentation Restructure

Examples

Two examples were added last month:

  • Example webpack was added to demo LoopBack running inside the browser as client-side JavaScript application.

  • Example socketio gives a basic implementation of socketio with LoopBack 4.

You can also download the examples by using the lb4 example command.

Enriching LoopBack and its Community - You are Invited!

As mentioned in our recent blog post, your contribution is important to make LoopBack a sustainable open source project.

Here is what you can do:

Let's make LoopBack a better framework together!