How to set up admin-on-rest with couchDB?

Question

Edit to the makers of AoR : Your framework suffers from horrid documentation. You should really focus on that, people would really adopt it then.

I cant for the life of me decipher how admin-on-rest does the 'rest' part. If there is a better framework with better documentation, Im open to that.

Im very new to react, so thats probably part of it.

What I can discern is that

1) The [Admin] tag takes a prop 'restClient', and this is a function that sets your base path to your JSON source, then returns a function with a specific signature (takes 3 arguments, returns a promise).

2) Then a [Resource] tag adds to the path with name="posts" and makes a list, which (heres where it turns to magic) basically does a wget to your database then iterates over the results.

What I want to do : hook up couchDB to admin-on-rest. I already have a few test docs made on localhost. The couchDB url looks like :

http://127.0.0.1:5984/myproject/_design/getclients/_view/getclient/

and this works in postman, giving me a json object like this :

{ 
"total_rows": 4,
"offset": 0,
"rows": [
    {
        "id": "afc3bb9218d1a5c1e81ab3cc9f004467",
        "key": {
            "status": "active",
            "rating": 9.1,
            "bio": {
                "fname": "Sam",
                "mname": "TestMName",
                "lname": "TestLName",
                "address": "712347 B Street",
                "state": "CA",
                "city": "Los Santos",
                "zip": "90211",
                "phone": "123-456-7890",
                "email": "[email protected]",
                "username": "TestSam",
                "password": "abc123"
            }
        },
        "value": null
    },

At this point Im so confused I dont know where to look.

Heres my code now :

//App.js

import React from 'react';
import { jsonServerRestClient, Admin, Resource } from 'admin-on-rest';

import { PostList } from './Posts.js';

const App = () => (

    <Admin restClient={jsonServerRestClient('http://127.0.0.1:5984/myproject/')}>
        <Resource name="_design/getclients/_view/getclient" list={PostList} />
    </Admin>
);

export default App;

And

//Posts.js
export const PostList = (props) => (
    <List {...props}>
        <Datagrid>
            <TextField source="status" />
            <TextField source="rating" />
        </Datagrid>
    </List>
);

The page loads but a little pink box pops up at the bottom saying :

The X-Total-Count header is missing in the HTTP Response. The jsonServer REST client expects responses 

Answer 1

The RestClient is a bit of a murky beast. Not perfectly documented for sure.

But it is in the end quite straightforward if you know how the whole thing works together.

1) Admin-On-Rest has defined some REST types (below). These are usually shot off by Redux actions (in their meta tag). The system scans for these rest types and if it sees them, then it calls the RestClient

GET_LIST
GET_ONE CREATE
UPDATE
DELETE
GET_MANY GET_MANY_REFERENCE

The REST client is called with these types and some other params. It is the job of the rest client to interpret the type and then use the params to make a request to your API. For this AOR uses the new Fetch API that is built into browsers.

You can access it by calling. You should also go into AOR source code and check out how it works.

import { fetchUtils } from 'admin-on-rest';

2) The X total count is a header field that AOR needs for all responses to the GET_LIST type. You can set this quite simply in your API. I use loopback and I set the X-Total-Count manually in a remote hook (don't worry about it if you don't know it) It seems your api is still using the JSON server. JSON server is a dummy API. So your app is not connected to your couchDB right now.

https://github.com/typicode/json-server

If you are not using an api server like express or loopback, then you can also configure your restClient do all request and response handling. You have to construct the URL. Read the below link so you can follow my example code further down.

https://marmelab.com/admin-on-rest/RestClients.html#decorating-your-rest-client-example-of-file-upload

so something like this.

    if (type === 'GET_LIST' && resource === 'posts') {        
const url = http://127.0.0.1:5984/myproject/_design/getclients/_view/getclient/
        options.method = 'GET';
        return fetchUtils.fetchJson(url, options)
          .then((response) => {
            const {headers, json} = response;
            //admin on rest needs the {data} key
            return {data: json,
                    total: parseInt(headers.get('x-total-count').split('/').pop(), 10)}

    })

You can also write a function like this to handle the request and response.

function handleRequestAndResponse(url, options={}) {
  return fetchUtils.fetchJson(url, options)
    .then((response) => {
      const {headers, json} = response;
      //admin on rest needs the {data} key
      const data = {data: json}
      if (headers.get('x-total-count')) {
        data.total = parseInt(headers.get('x-total-count').split('/').pop(), 10)
      } else {
        data.total = json.length // this is why the X-Total-Count is needed by Aor

}
}
      }
      // handle get_list responses
        return {data: json,
                total: } else {
        return data
      }
  })
}

The above code has been formatted in the window and so might not work straight out of the box. But I hope you get the idea.