Interception in LoopBack is inspired by aspect-oriented programming paradigm. Interceptors are reusable functions to provide aspect-oriented logic around method invocations.
See more details in the Interceptor documentation page.
Caching service
In the Greeter Application, the CachingService is being used for REST level caching, which is a common requirement for REST APIs. It uses the HTTP path URL as part of the caching key. If there are values matching the caching keys, the corresponding value in the cache will be used.
How is caching enforced
All HTTP requests are being intercepted by the
CachingInterceptor.
As mentioned above, the CachingService is using the HTTP path URL, which we can
obtain from the InvocationContext, as part of the caching key. If no matching
caching key is found, it goes through the business logic for the HTTP endpoint.
As the post-invocation logic, the value will be stored in the cache.
See the following code example:
return async (
ctx: InvocationContext,
next: () => ValueOrPromise<InvocationResult>,
) => {
const httpReq = await ctx.get(RestBindings.Http.REQUEST, {
optional: true,
});
/* istanbul ignore if */
if (!httpReq) {
// Not http request
return next();
}
const key = httpReq.path;
const lang = httpReq.acceptsLanguages(['en', 'zh']) || 'en';
const cachingKey = `${lang}:${key}`;
const cachedResult = await this.cachingService.get(cachingKey);
if (cachedResult) {
debug('Cache found for %s %j', cachingKey, cachedResult);
return cachedResult;
}
const result = await next();
await this.cachingService.set(cachingKey, result);
return result;
};
For complete code sample, see caching.intercepter.ts.
Create a proxy to apply interceptors
By default, requests are proxied between REST server and controller methods but not between controllers and their repository/service dependencies. See Create a proxy for interceptors documentation page and standalone example for more details.
Previous: Part 5 - Extension point and extension