Question

I’m new to Node/Express.. I see GET params can be captured like so:

app.get('/log/:name', api.logfunc);

POST like so:

app.post('/log', ... (form variables available in req.body.)

I’m aware of app.all, but is there a single way I can get all the variables for GET and POST when using app.all? (I’m too used to $_REQUEST in php!:)

thx,

Answer 1

You’re dealing with three different methods of parameter-passing:

1) Path parameters, which express’s router captures in req.param when you use colon-prefixed components or regex captures in your route. These can be present in both GET and POST requests.

2) URL query-string parameters, which will be captured in req.query if you use the express.query middleware. These can also be present in both GET and POST requests.

3) Body parameters, which will be captured in req.body if you use the express.bodyParser middleware. These will only be present in POST requests that have a Content-Type of “x-www-form-urlencoded”.

So what you need to do is to merge all three objects (if they exist) into one. There are no native Object methods for doing this, but there are lots of popular workarounds. For example, the underscore.js library defines an extend function, which would allow you to write

req.params=_.extend(req.params || {}, req.query || {}, req.body || {}).

If you don’t want to use a library and want to roll your own way of extending objects, take a look at this blog post.