Too tidious hooks when querying in REST. Any ideas?

Question

I've just started using feathers to build REST server. I need your help for querying tips. Document says

When used via REST URLs all query values are strings. Depending on the service the values in params.query might have to be converted to the right type in a before hook. (https://docs.feathersjs.com/api/databases/querying.html)

, which puzzles me. find({query: {value: 1} }) does mean value === "1" not value === 1 ? Here is example client side code which puzzles me:

const feathers = require('@feathersjs/feathers')
const fetch = require('node-fetch')
const restCli = require('@feathersjs/rest-client')
const rest = restCli('http://localhost:8888')
const app = feathers().configure(rest.fetch(fetch))
async function main () {
  const Items = app.service('myitems')
  await Items.create( {name:'one', value:1} )

  //works fine. returns [ { name: 'one', value: 1, id: 0 } ]
  console.log(await Items.find({query:{ name:"one" }}))

  //wow!  no data returned. []
  console.log(await Items.find({query:{ value:1 }})) // []
}
main()

Server side code is here:

const express = require('@feathersjs/express')
const feathers = require('@feathersjs/feathers')
const memory = require('feathers-memory')
const app = express(feathers())
            .configure(express.rest())
            .use(express.json())
            .use(express.errorHandler())
            .use('myitems', memory())
app.listen(8888)
.on('listening',()=>console.log('listen on 8888'))

I've made hooks, which works all fine but it is too tidious and I think I missed something. Any ideas?

Hook code:

app.service('myitems').hooks({
  before: { find:  async (context) => {
    const value = context.params.query.value
    if (value) context.params.query.value = parseInt(value)
    return context
    }
  }
})

Answer 1

This behaviour depends on the database and ORM you are using. Some that have a schema (like feathers-mongoose, feathers-sequelize and feathers-knex), will convert values like that automatically.

Feathers itself does not know about your data format and most adapters (like the feathers-memory you are using here) do a strict comparison so they will have to be converted. The usual way to deal with this is to create some reusable hooks (instead of one for each field) like this:

const queryToNumber = (...fields) => {
  return context => {
    const { params: { query = {} } } = context;

    fields.forEach(field => {
      const value = query[field];
      if(value) {
        query[field] = parseInt(value, 10)
      }
    });
  }
}

app.service('myitems').hooks({
  before: {
    find: [
      queryToNumber('age', 'value')
    ]
  }
});

Or using something like JSON schema e.g. through the validateSchema common hook.