Upgrading

Ketting version 1 to 5 was relatively stable, but Ketting 6 introduces larger changes. Many of these changes were made to fix long-standing architecture issues, and open the door to new features and strong integration with Front- end frameworks such as React.

What's new

A non-exhaustive list of new features:

• A react-ketting package with deep React integration via Hooks.
• Multiple cache strategies, such as forever, short and never.
• Support for fetch-middlewares. OAuth2 is reimplemented as such a plugin. these plugins can be added globally, or per-origin.
• get() now returns a State object, and functions such as put() will require one as an argument.
• put() now automatically updates the state cache.
• Support for HEAD requests and following links from HEAD response headers.
• It's now possible to set Content-Type and other headers on every resource method such as Resource.post(), Resource.patch(), etc.
• update, stale and delete events on Resources.
• Links can now be mutated and sent back to the server.
• Support for submitting HTML forms and Siren actions.
• Nested transcluded items/embeds.
• A separate post() and postFollow() method.
• Better support for binary responses and text/* responses.

What's changed?

State objects

By far the largest change is the use of State objects. In Ketting 5 and below, you would get a parsed HTTP response when calling get().

// Ketting 5
const body = await resource.get();

The result of .get() is now a State object. To get the response body, you need to get it from the .data property.

// Ketting 6
const state = await resource.get();
const body = state.body;

Similarly, when doing a PUT request, you need also wrap your body:

// Ketting 5
await resource.put({
  title: 'Hello world'
});

// Ketting 6
await resource.put({
  data: {
    title: 'Hello world'
  }
});

You might ask why. We wanted the ability to get more information from responses, and pass more information when doing requests. Implementing this in a BC way would have been a pain and make for an ugly API.

The State object adds a ton of data that would otherwise have been difficult to get to:

• State.data - The response data.
• State.uri - URI of the resource
• State.links - List of all links related to the response.
• State.contentType - Content type string
• State.contentHeaders - HTTP Headers related to the content.
• State.action() - Execute actions such as submitting HTML forms or submit Siren actions.
• State.serializeBody() - Return a serialized version of the body.

Another design goal was that the State object should entirely encapsulate state synchronous, so without the use of promises or async/await. It's all there. This makes it much easier to use in functional programming paradigms, and modern frontend frameworks.

It also allows users to for example: Get state, add a (hal-) link and submit the result again:

// Ketting 6
const state = await resource.get();
state.links.add('author', 'Dr. Pidgin');
await resource.put(state);

Lastly, there's a subscription framework related to states. When Ketting 'knows' of a new state, it will emit an update event.

// Ketting 6
resource.on('update', (state: State) => {
  // We got a new State
  // Either caused by a `PUT` request, a `GET` response, or maybe the
  // resource was embedded in another resource's response.
});

Depreciations

The following functions are now deprecated:

• Resource.hasLink()
• Resource.links()
• Resource.link()

They will be removed in a future major Ketting release.

This is how you migrate:

// Ketting 5
const link = await resource.link('rel');
const links = await resource.links('rel');
const hasLink = await resource.hasLink('rel');


// Ketting 6
const state = await resource.get();

const link = state.links.get('rel');
const links = state.links.getMany('rel');
const hasLink = state.links.has('rel');

Once you have a State object, you get access to all the link information syncronously.

In Ketting 6 you can also do the same with a .head() request. If links are in the HTTP headers of the response to HEAD, they're all there.

getResource() is removed

The Client.getResource(uri) and Resource.getResource(uri) were used to get a resource based on a (potentially relative) uri.

This function was renamed to .go() some time ago:

Just search and replace getResource() to go() and you're good to go.

Changes to .post()

In REST apis, POST typically has 2 major functions:

1. To submit an action or a form (RPC style).
2. To create a new resource.

It was hard to make a easy-to-use function to cover both cases, especially since the return types of each may be different.

In Ketting 6, the old post() function is now split in 2 new functions:

• .post() for RPC style submission. This returns a State object, which has the response body and other information.
• .postFollow() for 'create' actions.

I suspect that most uses of .post() need to be migrated to .postFollow(). Here's how it works:

// Ketting 6
const newResource = await parentResource.postFollow({
  data: {
    title: "New blog post!",
  }
});

newResource in the above example will be the brand new resource that you just created. It works because if the server returns a 201 Created status, and a Location header, it knows that a new resource was created and where it lives.

If the server returned a 204 No Content or 205 Reset Content response, .postFollow() will simply return the current resource again.

Authentication changes

In the past, to set up Ketting with OAuth2 or Basic auth, this was accomplished via a complex settings object in the Ketting constructor:

// Ketting 5
import { Client } from 'ketting';

const client = new Client(
  'api.example.org',
  {
    auth: {
      type: 'basic',
      userName: 'foo',
      password: 'bar'
    }
  }
);

const client = new Client(
  'api.example.org',
  {
    auth: {
      type: 'oauth2',
      grant_type: 'authorization_code',
      clientId: 'fooClient',
      code: '...',
      tokenEndpointUri: 'https://api.example.org/oauth/token',
    }
  }
});

In Ketting 6, auhtentication is handled via plugins, or Fetch middlewares.

// Ketting 6
import { Client, basicAuth, oauth2 } from 'ketting';

const client = new Client('api.example.org');

client.use(basicAuth({
  userName: 'foo',
  password: 'bar'
});

client.use(oauth2({
  grant_type: 'authorization_code',
  clientId: 'fooClient',
  code: '...',
  tokenEndpointUri: 'https://api.example.org/oauth/token',
});

To only set up authentication for a single domain (origin), use the second argument of use()

// Ketting 6
client.use(oauth2({
  grant_type: 'authorization_code',
  clientId: 'fooClient',
  code: '...',
  tokenEndpointUri: 'https://api.example.org/oauth/token',
}, 'api.example.org');

Wildcards are supported here for domain-wide authentication:

// Ketting 6
client.use(oauth2({
  grant_type: 'authorization_code',
  clientId: 'fooClient',
  code: '...',
  tokenEndpointUri: 'https://api.example.org/oauth/token',
}, '*.example.org');

Questions?

If you run into issues, we would love to hear from you. We want the docs to be as good as possible, so please open a ticket.