Assign requestjs response to variable

Question

How would one assign the body of request.get('http://someurl/file.json', function(err, response, body) {}) to a variable?

For example:

file.json

{
    "Name1": {
        "prop": "value"
    },
    "Name2": {
        "prop": "value"
    }
}

app.js

var json = request.get(http://localhost/file.json);
json = JSON.parse(json);

console.log(json["Name1"].prop);

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

var myvariable1;

request.get('http://someurl/file.json', function(err, response, body) {
    myvariable1=response.Name1.prop;
})

the body is not available until the callback is complete. I don't think there is any shorthand for callbacks that allows what you want. However, there is a shorthand for promises. You could use the bluebird npm module to try and promisify this. You could then do ... myvar = request.get('path'); .... myvar would then contain the result of the resolved promise ON resultion (not before) - this works in an AngularJS environment for sure and prob would work in pure Node too - Hope that gives some food for thought.

You could also use something like the q library to promisify this (which I believe is now in Node by default).

function getMyData() {
    var def=q.defer();
    request.get('http://someurl/file.json', function(err, response, body) {
        def.resolve(response.Name1.prop);
    })
    return def.promise();
}

// myvar will have the result of the resolution on resolution (not before)
var myvar = getMyData();

// to test this approach you might want to use a settimeout to repeatedly dump the value of myvar every X ms.
// Again this approach deffo works in Angular and hopefully works in Node too.

Worse case scenario if this doesn't work then you resort COULD resort to ...

var myvar;
getMyData().then(function(data) {
  myvar = data;
));

Which puts you back kinda where you started lol :)

PS I have ignored error handling with promise CATCH blocks for the sake of simplicity