Create Simple Node.js API from JSON files

Question

I have a folder of JSON files that I'd like to use to create a simple API from.

Here's a simplified version of my folder structure:

/clients.json

/clients/1/client.json

/clients/2/client.json

...

my /clients.json file looks like this:

[
    {
        "id": 1,
        "name": "Jon Parker"
    },
    {
        "id": 2,
        "name": "Gareth Edwards"
    },
    ...
]

and my /clients/1/client.json file looks like this:

[
    {
        "date": "2014-09-12",
        "score": 40,
        ...
    },
    {
        "date": "2015-02-27",
        "score": 75,
        ...
    },  
    {
        "date": "2015-05-10",
        "score": 75,
        ...
    },
    {
        "date": "2016-08-27",
        "score": 60,
        ...
    }
]

The id from clients.json relates to the folder in which the associated details are.

I have a lot of JSON files in the clients folder and rather than loading these all individually on the client side, I wanted to create an API using Node.js that gives me more flexibility, i.e...

returning a list of client names and id's /clients

returning the client details /clients/:id/details

and most importantly returning all clients with there names and associated details /clients/all/details

I did begin playing with json-server, however it requires that your JSON be an object rather than an array, and I'm stuck with the format of this JSON unfortunately.

Appreciate any help!

Answer 1

Use the built-in file system module to get files from the file system.

Refer here

Here's an example.

var fs = require('fs');

exports.getClientDetail = function (id) {
  var result;
  fs.readFile('/clients/' + id + '/client.json', function (err, data) {
    if (err) throw err;

    result.push(JSON.parse(data));
  });
}
exports.getAllClientsDetail = function () {      
  // if the id is sequential, you can check if '/clients/' + id + '/client.json' exists for every i from 1 and up.  If it does - push it to an array of objects. if for a certain i it does not exist, quit the scan and return the array of objects.
}

Answer 2

You can require the json directly as an object in node, something like this:

app.get('/clients/:id/details', (req, resp) => {
  const id = req.params.id;
  const data = require(`./clients/${id}/client.json`); // or whatever path
  resp.send(data)
});