Access To Rest API Data Made Easy

Lately I had to read and set values in nested data structures of REST APIs very often. That was already slowly turning into work.

I can't remember how many times I wrote the following structures or similar in the last months.

const a = {}

if(typeof a ==='object') {
  if(a['b'] !==undefined ) {
    // do something 
  }
}

Alternatively you can also work with Optional chaining. However, this also has its challenges.

For this reason I wrote the auxiliary class Pathfinder. This is a small class that bundles all the queries.

The integration is done via import.

import {Pathfinder} from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@schukai/monster@1.23.0/dist/modules/data/pathfinder.js';

Methods

With this class come 4 methods exists, deleteVia, setVia and getVia. With these, structures can be manipulated quickly and easily.

getVia

First an example of how read access is possible.

new Pathfinder({
a: {
    b: {
        f: [
            {
                g: false,
            }
        ],
    }
}
}).getVia("a.b.f.0.g"); 

// ↦ false

setVia

To write a value you can use the setVia method:

obj = {};

new Pathfinder(obj).setVia('a.b.0.c', true); 

// ↦ {a:{b:[{c:true}]}}

Wildcards

A nice little additional feature is the use of wildcards. Here you can extract several values from a structure.

let value = new Pathfinder({
a: {
    b: {
        f: [
            {
                g: 1,
            },
            {
                g: 2,
            }
        ],
    }
}
}).getVia("a.b.f.*.g");

console.log(value.forEach((a,b)=>{console.log(a,b)}));
// ↦ 1 "0"
// ↦ 2 "1"

The worst path you can choose is to choose none.

Voila that's it