NGSI.js

NGSI.js is the JavaScript library used by WireCloud for adding FIWARE NGSI capabilities to widgets and operators. However, this library has also been designed to be used in other environments as normal web pages and clients/servers running on Node.js.

This library has been developed following the FIWARE NGSI v1, NGSI v2 and the NGSI-LD specifications and has been tested to work against version 0.26.0+ of the Orion Context Broker.

Reference documentation of the API is available at http://ficodes.github.io/ngsijs/stable/NGSI.html.

## Using NGSI.js from normal web pages

Note: Support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) has been added on orion 1.10.0. This support must be enabled to access the context broker from a web page in a different domain than the context broker.

CORS support can also be enabled by accessing to the context broker server using some proxies, like cors-anywhere or the FIWARE's pep proxy.

You can access any context broker server (without requiring CORS support and regardless of the context broker version) if the context broker is accessible throught the same domain as the web page. How to create such configuration is out of the scope of this documentation.

Just include a <script> element linking to the NGSI.min.js file:

<script type="text/javascript" src="url_to_NGSI.js"></script>

Once added the <script> element, you will be able to use all the features provided by the NGSI.js library (except receiving notifications):

const connection = new NGSI.Connection("http://orion.example.com:1026");
connection.v2.listEntities().then((response) => {
    response.results.forEach((entity) => {
        console.log(entity.id);
    });
});

This example will display the id of the first 20 entities. See the documentation of the listEntities method for more info.

To be able to receive notifications inside a web browser the library requires the use of a ngsi-proxy server. You can use your own instance or the ngsi-proxy instance available at https://ngsiproxy.lab.fiware.org.

const connection = new NGSI.Connection("http://orion.example.com:1026", {
    ngsi_proxy_url: "https://ngsiproxy.lab.fiware.org"
});

Using NGSI.js from Node.js

$ npm install ngsijs

After installing the NGSI.js node module, you will be able to use the API as usual:

const NGSI = require('ngsijs');
const connection = new NGSI.Connection("http://orion.example.com:1026");
connection.v2.listEntities().then((response) => {
    response.results.forEach((entity) => {
        console.log(entity.id);
    });
});

Note: Node.js doesn't require the usage of a ngsi-proxy as you can create an HTTP endpoint easily (e.g. using express). Anyway, you can use it if you want, you only have to take into account that is better to directly provide the HTTP endpoint to reduce the overhead.

Using NGSI.js from WireCloud widgets/operators

WireCloud already provides some components (widgets, operators and mashups) allowing NGSI connectivity. E.g.:

Anyway, WireCloud uses NGSI.js as the binding for connecting to context brokers. If you need to create a new specific component you can take a look into the "3.2.1. Using Orion Context Broker" tutorial available at the FIWARE Academy.

Testing

NGSI.js tests are based on Jasmine and are executed using Karma and grunt when testing the browser integration and directly using Jasmine when testing Node.js integration. Both environments are using Istanbul for generating coverage reports.

To be able to execute those tests, you need to install all the requried dependencies. To do so, execute the following commands on a local working copy of the NGSI.js repository:

$ sudo npm install -g grunt-cli
$ npm install

Once installed, you can run the tests on Firefox and Chrome by issuing the following command:

$ grunt test

On the other hand, if you wish to run the tests using Node.js, just issue the following command:

$ npm test

License

NGSI.js is licensed under Affero General Public License (GPL) version 3 (or any later, at your option) with classpath-like exception.

Are there any legal issues with AGPL 3.0? Is it safe for me to use?

There is absolutely no problem in using a product licensed under AGPL 3.0. Issues with GPL (or AGPL) licenses are mostly related with the fact that different people assign different interpretations on the meaning of the term “derivate work” used in these licenses. Due to this, some people believe that there is a risk in just using software under GPL or AGPL licenses (even without modifying it).

For the avoidance of doubt, the owners of this software licensed under an AGPL-3.0 license wish to make a clarifying public statement as follows:

Please note that software derived as a result of modifying the source code of this software in order to fix a bug or incorporate enhancements is considered a derivative work of the product. Software that merely uses or aggregates (i.e. links to) an otherwise unmodified version of existing software is not considered a derivative work, and therefore it does not need to be released as under the same license, or even released as open source.