Controllers vs routers
Foxx Controllers have been replaced with routers. This is more than a cosmetic change as there are significant differences in behavior:
Controllers were automatically mounted when the file defining them was executed. Routers need to be explicitly mounted using the module.context.use
method. Routers can also be exported, imported and even nested. This makes it easier to split up complex routing trees across multiple files.
Old:
'use strict';
const Foxx = require('org/arangodb/foxx');
const ctrl = new Foxx.Controller(applicationContext);
ctrl.get('/hello', function (req, res) {
// ...
});
New:
'use strict';
const createRouter = require('org/arangodb/foxx/router');
const router = createRouter();
// If you are importing this file from your entry file ("main"):
module.exports = router;
// Otherwise: module.context.use(router);
router.get('/hello', function (req, res) {
// ...
});
Some general changes in behavior that might trip you up:
When specifying path parameters with schemas Foxx will now ignore the route if the schema does not match (i.e.
/hello/foxx
will no longer match/hello/:num
ifnum
specifies a schema that doesn’t match the value"foxx"
). With controllers this could previously result in users seeing a 400 (bad request) error when they should instead be served a 404 (not found) response.When a request is made with an HTTP verb not supported by an endpoint, Foxx will now respond with a 405 (method not allowed) error with an appropriate
Allowed
header listing the supported HTTP verbs for that endpoint.Foxx will no longer parse your JSDoc comments to generate route documentation (use the
summary
anddescription
methods of the endpoint instead).The
apiDocumentation
method now lives on the service context and behaves slightly differently.There is no router equivalent for the
activateAuthentication
andactivateSessions
methods. Instead you should use the session middleware (see the section on sessions below).There is no
del
alias for thedelete
method on routers. It has always been safe to use keywords as method names in Foxx, so the use of this alias was already discouraged before.The
allRoutes
proxy is no lot available on routers but can easily be replaced with middleware or child routers.