loopback-example-connector (REST)

Overview

This example demonstrates basic use of loopback-connector-rest.

The project has two servers: local-server and external-server. The “external” server serves a simple REST API, while the local server fetches data using this REST API.

Running the app

$ git clone https://github.com/strongloop-community/loopback-example-connector.git
$ cd loopback-example-connector
$ git checkout rest
$ cd external-server
$ npm install
$ node .

In another shell:

$ cd local-server
$ npm install
$ node .

You should see console messages on the local server. Verify the data has been retrieved from the remote server by doing a GET request on Magazines in the explorer or by running curl localhost:3000/api/Magazines.

FAQs

The following are common questions related to using the REST connector.

How do you perform a GET request to a remote server?

In this example, we have a REST API exposed in model-config.json .

To make a request to the remote server, declare new datasource that uses the REST connector in the local datasources.json.

A few things to note in this file is the connector property’s value is rest and there is an operations property that takes an array of objects.

This object has two properties: template and function.

The template property contains method which is the HTTP method type to perform the request with and url which is the URL to the remote resource.

The function property is the name of the property you will use to trigger the request. For example, we name our property find because we will trigger the request using Magazine.find()....

The idea is to use find to make a GET request to a url we specify.