Roku Developer Program

[nmaves]

I am trying to figure out the best way to have reusable code with different error conditions.  Below is a sample of a reusable function to execute network requests.  In most languages you can throw/catch errors.  There is nothing like that in BS.  So what do you do when you get a non 2xx message back from an api and you want to use their message in the payload?  How does the calling function know that the was an error?  I really don't want to have the boilerplate code below everywhere in my app.

function request(url As String, body as string, httpType as string) as Object
    ' ? "POST URL :"; url
    ' ? "POST BODY :"; body
    obj = CreateObject("roUrlTransfer")
    obj.setUrl(url)
    obj.setRequest(httpType)
    obj.setCertificatesFile("common:/certs/ca-bundle.crt")
    obj.addHeader("ws-api", m.global.apiVersion)
    obj.addHeader("app", m.global.app)
    obj.addHeader("user-agent", m.global.userAgent)
    obj.setPort(CreateObject("roMessagePort"))
    obj.addHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded")
    obj.enableEncodings(true)

    if (m.global.authToken <> invalid and m.global.authToken <> "")
        obj.addHeader("authorization", "Bearer " + m.global.authToken)
    end if

    if (obj.AsyncPostFromString(body))
        msg = wait(10000, obj.GetPort())
        if (type(msg) = "roUrlEvent")
          code = msg.GetResponseCode()
          ? "response code "; code

          if (code = 200)
             ? msg.GetString()
             return msg.GetString()
          else
            ' error case
            return msg.GetString()
          endif
        else if (msg = invalid)
          request.AsyncCancel()
        endif
    endif

    return invalid
end function

[tim_beynart]

obj.RetainBodyOnError(true) will allow you to read the response body

[tim_beynart]

BTW, in SceneGraph you can write one task to handle all your HTTP requests and reuse it all over your app

[nmaves]

Thanks Tim,

I have chosen to use multiple small tasks that all use some helper functions like the one above. 

Even if I read the response body and return that from the above function, the caller would not know if it was an error or not.  I am now thinking about returning a object with a status and response.  Heck, maybe I should just return the message itself.

[tim_beynart]

There are so many ways to design this, but personally I use a task with a `response` field and an `error` field, and the clients will observe both. I include the HTTP code and the body of the response for both.