RestChain

RestChain is a library to wrap REST API calls and make their use look and feel like standard method calls. RestChain is based on the Rest Client library.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rest_chain'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rest_chain

First thing to do is to require in the library. Do this bad adding a line like the following to the top of your script...

require "rest_chain"

Next you need to create a RestChain::Chain object. The Chain class constructor takes a Hash of setting options and recognises the following keys in this Hash...

• :host A String containing the name of the host on which the REST API service is running. You must specify this value.

• :logger A Logger class instance that the Chain will use for logging purposes. This is optional.

• :parameters A Hash of common parameters (i.e. parameters that are to be part of all requests). This is optional.

• :path An Array or String of the common parts of the path used in REST API URLs. For example if the path for all REST API URLs started with /api/v1/ you could specify these in this parameter to avoid having to repeatedly specify them on chained REST calls. This is optional.

• :port The port number the REST API service is listening on. Only needed if the service is running on a non-standard port (i.e. 80 for HTTP services or 443 for HTTPS services). This is optional.

• :scheme The protocol scheme to be used when making REST API requests. Options are "http" or "https". This is optional with the default being "https".

So creating a new Chain object might look as follows...

chain = RestChain::Chain.new(host: "myresthost.com", path: ["api", "v1"])

Once you have a Chain object you can make requests against it. Lets say you wished to fetch the details for a specific user from your REST service and the URL to do that looked as follows

https://myresthost.com/api/v1/users/<user id>

Where the <user id> part will be replaced by the unique identifier of the users whose details are to be retrieved. You could use the Chain object to fetch a user with an id of 123 as follows...

response = chain.users(123).get

Note that if there were parameters that you wanted to append to the request (e.g. a session id) then you can specify them as part of the 'verb' method that is used to initiate the request. So, using the previous example as a basis, you could add the session id like this...

response = chain.users(123).get(session_id: session.id)

Methods are provided for the delete, get, patch, post and put verbs that all work in a similar fashion.

This call would return a RestChain::RestResponse object. This object will possess details for the response received for the request including the status code of the response, the headers and the response body. If you knew your response would contain JSON formatted content then you could convert that directly to a Ruby equivalent using...

response.json

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/rest_chain/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request