Songkick::Transport ↑

This is a transport layer abstraction for talking to our service APIs. It provides an abstract HTTP-like interface while hiding the underlying transport and serialization details. It transparently deals with parameter serialization, including the following:

We currently support three backends:

If the service you're talking to returns Content-Type: application/json, we automatically parse the response for you. You can register parsers for other content types as described below.

Using the transports ↑

Let's say you're running a Sinatra application that exposes some JSON:

require 'sinatra'

get '/ohai' do
  headers 'Content-Type' => 'application/json'
  '{"hello":"world"}'
end

In order to talk to this service, you select a transport to use and make the request:

require 'songkick/transport'
Transport = Songkick::Transport::Curb

client = Transport.new('http://localhost:4567',
                       :user_agent => 'Test Agent',
                       :timeout    => 5)

response = client.get('/ohai')
# => Songkick::Transport::Response::OK

response.data
# => {"hello" => "world"}

Songkick::Transport::Curb and Songkick::Transport::HttParty both take a hostname on instantiation. Songkick::Transport::RackTest takes a reference to a Rack application, for example:

require 'songkick/transport'
Transport = Songkick::Transport::RackTest

client = Transport.new(Sinatra::Application,
                       :user_agent => 'Test Agent',
                       :timeout    => 5,
                       :basic_auth => {:username => "foo", :password => "bar"})

All transports expose exactly the same instance methods.

The client supports the delete, get, head, patch, post, put and options methods, which all take a path and an optional Hash of parameters, for example:

client.post('/users', :username => 'bob', :password => 'foo')

If the response is successful, meaning there are no errors caused by the server- or client-side software or the network between them, then a response object is returned. If the response contains data, the object's data method exposes it as a parsed data structure.

The response's headers are exposed through the headers method, which is an immutable hash-like object that normalizes various header conventions.

response = client.get('/users')

# These all return 'application/json'
response.headers['Content-Type']
response.headers['content-type']
response.headers['HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE']

If there is an error caused by our software, the request returns nil and an error is logged. If there is an error caused by user input, a UserError response is returned with data and errors attributes.

Response conventions ↑

This library was primarily developed to talk to Songkick's backend services, and as such adopts some conventions that put it at a higher level of abstraction than a vanilla HTTP client.

A response object has the following properties:

Only responses with status codes, 200 (OK), 201 (Created), 204 (No Content), and 409 (Conflict) yield response objects. All other status codes cause an exception to be raised. We use 409 to indicate user error, i.e. input validation errors as opposed to software/infrastructure errors. The response object is typed for the status code; the possible types are:

If the request raises an exception, it will be of one of the following types:

It is possible to customise the status codes which are treated as UserError when initializing the client. Requests responding with any of the provided status codes will then yield a response object with error details, rather than raising an exception;

client = Transport.new('http://localhost:4567',
                       :user_error_codes => [409, 422])

Registering response parsers ↑

Songkick::Transport automatically sets response.data if the content-type of the response is application/json. You can register parsers for other content-types like so:

Songkick::Transport.register_parser('application/yaml', YAML)

The parser object you register must respond to parse(string).

You can also register a default parser, to handle all content types that don't have a specified parser.

Songkick::Transport.register_default_parser(DefaultParser)

Nested parameters ↑

All transports support serialization of nested parameters, for example you can send this:

client.post('/venues', :venue => {:name => 'HMV Forum', :city_id => 4})

and it will send this query string to the server:

venue[name]=HMV+Forum&venue[city_id]=4

It can serialize fairly complicated data structures, within the limits of what can represented using query strings, for example this structure:

{ "lisp" => ["define", {"square" => ["x", "y"]}, "*", "x", "x"] }

is serialized as:

lisp[]=define&lisp[][square][]=x&lisp[][square][]=y&lisp[]=%2A&lisp[]=x&lisp[]=x

Rails and Sinatra will parse this back into the original data structure for you on the server side.

Request headers, timeouts and basic auth ↑

You can make requests with custom headers using with_headers. The return value of with_headers works just like a client object, so you can use it for multiple requests:

auth = client.with_headers('Authorization' => 'OAuth abc123')
auth.get('/me')
auth.put('/users/99', :username => 'bob')

Note that with_headers will normalize Rack-style headers for easy forwarding of input from the front end. For example, HTTP_USER_AGENT is converted to User-Agent in the outgoing request.

Similarly, the request timeout can be adjusted per-request:

client.with_timeout(10).get('/slow_resource')

Likewise basic auth credentials:

client.with_basic_auth({:username => "foo", :password => "bar"}).get('/')

File uploads ↑

File uploads are handled transparently for you by the post and put methods. If the value of any parameter (including parameters nested inside hashes) is of type Songkick::Transport::IO, the whole request will be treated as multipart/form-data and all the data will be serialized for you.

Songkick::Transport::IO must be instantiated with an IO object, a mime type, and a filename, for example:

file = File.open('concerts.xml')
io = Songkick::Transport::IO.new(file, 'application/xml', 'concerts.xml')
client.post('/inventories', :inventory => io)
file.close

The file upload can be mixed with normal textual data, and nested hashes, for example:

client.post('/inventories', :inventory => {:file => io, :date => '2012-03-01'})

On Sinatra, you get a hash containing both the tempfile and some metadata. You can use this to construct an IO to forward to another service. The complete params look like:

{
  :inventory => {
    :file => {
      :name     => "inventory[file]",
      :filename => "concerts.xml",
      :type     => "application/xml",
      :tempfile => #<File:/tmp/RackMultipart20120301-31254-15b6o5r-0>,
      :head     => "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"inventory[file]\"; filename=\"concerts.xml\"\r\nContent-Length: 6694\r\nContent-Type: application/xml\r\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: binary\r\n"
    }
    :date => "2012-03-01"
  }
}

file = params[:inventory][:file]
io = Songkick::Transport::IO.new(file[:tempfile], file[:type], file[:filename])

On Rails 2, you just get a tempfile, but it has some additional methods to get what you need. The params look like this:

{
  "inventory" => {
    "file" => #<File:/tmp/CGI20120301-32754-gzgzdy-0>,
    "date" => "2012-03-01"
  }
}

file = params["inventory"]["file"]
io = Songkick::Transport::IO.new(file, file.content_type, file.original_filename)

Songkick::Transport has a helper for turning both these upload object types into an IO for you:

io = Songkick::Transport.io(params[:inventory][:file])

You can then use this to forward uploaded files to another service from your Rails or Sinatra application.

Logging, instrumentation and reporting ↑

You can enable basic logging by supplying a logger and switching logging on.

Songkick::Transport.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
Songkick::Transport.verbose = true

The default setting (before you set Songkick::Transport.verbose = true is that Transport will warn you about all errors, i.e. any request that raises an exception. With verbose = true, it also logs the details of every request made; it logs the requests using a format you can paste into a curl command, and logs the status code, data and duration of every response.

There may be params you don't want in your logs, and you can specify those:

Songkick::Transport.sanitize 'password', /access_token/

This method accepts both strings and regexes. Any parameter name (as serialized in a query string) that matches one of these will be logged as e.g. password=[REMOVED].

It also sanitizes custom headers that are put in the logs, so you might want to exclude headers used for authentication:

Songkick::Transport.sanitize /Authorization/i, /Cookie/i

There is also a more advanced reporting system that lets you aggregate request statistics. During a request to a web application, many requests to backend services may be involved. The reporting system lets you collect information about all the backend requests that happened while executing a block. For example you can use it to create a logging middleware:

class Reporter
  def initialize(app)
    @app = app
  end

  def call(env)
    report = Songkick::Transport.report
    response = report.execute { @app.call(env) }
    # write report details somewhere
    response
  end
end

The report object is an array-like object that contains data for all the requests made during the block's execution. Each request responds to the following API:

The report object itself also responds to total_duration, which gives you the total time spent calling backend services during the block.

To instrument transports using the `ActiveSupport::Notifications` API, pass `{:instrumenter => ActiveSupport::Notifications}` in the options. You can also override the default event label of `http.songkick_transport` by passing `:instrumentation_label`.

Writing Service classes ↑

`Songkick::Transport::Service` is a class to make writing service clients more convenient.

Set up config globally (perhaps in a Rails initializer):

Songkick::Transport::Service.set_endpoints("blah-service" => "of1-dev-services:2347")
Songkick::Transport::Service.user_agent "myproject"
Songkick::Transport::Service.timeout 60 # optional, default is 10

Subclass to create service clients:

class BlahService < Songkick::Transport::Service
  endpoint "blah-service"

  # these global configs can also be set at the class level, in which case they
  # override the global config
  user_agent "myproject mainservice class"
  timeout 10

  def get_data
    http.get("/stuff", :search => "name")
  end
end

The default transport layer for clients inheriting from `Songkick::Transport::Service` is Curb, if you want to use something else you can override it globally or in a class with:

transport_layer Songkick::Transport::HttParty

You can specify extra headers to be sent with every request from a service class and from the root class, and they are merged together:

Songkick::Transport::Service.with_headers "rlah" => "1"

class BlahService < Songkick::Transport::Service
  with_headers "blah" => "1"
end

class FlahService < BlahService
  with_headers "flah" => "1"

  def get_data
    http.get("/stuff") # will have headers "rlah", "blah" and "flah"
  end
end

To pass extra, perhaps transport-specific, options hashes to the transport layer on initialize, specify them with:

class FooService < Songkick::Transport::Service
  transport_layer Songkick::Transport::Curb
  transport_layer_options :no_signal => true
end

These are also inheritable, and merge down like extra headers do.

License ↑

The MIT License

Copyright © 2012-2015 Songkick

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.