Faker

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About

Faker (or REST Faker) is a Node.js tool that enables you to set up a mockup REST server to test against when developing your apps by using simple JSON files. It currently supports GET, POST, PUT and DELETE requests as well as paginating and sorting.

This app was originally developed to assist in the development and integration of ExtJS applications, augmenting conventional mockups with enhaced capabilities which more closely resemble the behaviour of a backend system.

Installation

Requirements

NodeJS (download)

Setup

Clone this repository - https / ssh / svn
Install package dependencies using npm install.
(Optional) Edit config.json, located in Faker's root folder.
(Optional) Take a look inside the example/ folder to get the grasp of how to define your own resources and templates.
Execute the comand node faker to start your faker server. Enjoy!

Creating a resource

Defining a resource to be exposed by Faker's REST API is as easy as filling a JSON file with minimal data.

Let's review the process followed for the definition of a Users resource. In the first place, we must navigate to our servers folder (this path is defined in the path.appServers property of our config.json. Let us imagine our application is codenamed simply fooApp1. In our servers folder, we will create a folder called fooApp1, and a file called Users.json. The root of all the resources in our fooApp1 application will be located under <server_address>/api/fooApp1, and Users.json will be mapped to the URI <server_address>/api/fooApp1/Users.

Time to edit the contents of Users.json:

{
  "useId": true,
  "idParam": "id",
  "template": null,
  "actions": [
    "POST",
    "GET",
    "DELETE"
  ],

  "limitParam": "limit",

  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "id",
      "type": "int"
    },
    {
      "name": "name",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "surname",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "age",
      "type": "int"
    },
    {
      "name": "email",
      "type": "string"
    }
  ]
}

Here is a brief description of each property and its meaning:

useId: true/false. Use true to indicate that this resource can be accessed by ID. In our case, this means that in requests of the form /api/fooApp1/Users/something/... the part something will be parsed as the ID of the resource User being accesed (although, for nested resources, the value of this ID is irrelevant, since nested data manipulation is not available in faker. If useId's value was false, then something would be parsed as a resource expected to be defined in our servers folder, at /fooApp1/Users/something/... or /fooApp1/Users/something.json.
idParam: the name of the field that will be used as the ID parameter or attribute for this resource. In this case, "id" implies that when we access /Users/1, the 1 is the value of the field "id" (which is defined in the "fields" array several lines below). If we specified "name", then accessing /Users/Tom would try to access the data for the resource User whose "name" equals to "Tom".
template: reference to a JSON file located under the path specified in config.json under path.templates. This JSON object can contain properties in it with the values "{data}", "{count}", "{info}" or "{success}". The API will then return JSON representations of this resource using the specified template and filling the these special properties with the result data, number of matching elements, info/error messages and a success property indicating whether the request was successful or not. For example, "template": "ext" would look for the file <path.templates>/ext.json.
actions: an array which should contain one or more the following values (non case-sensitive): "GET", "POST", "PUT" or "DELETE". In this case, we allow reading (GET), creating (POST) and deleting (DELETE) resources of this type, but not updating (PUT).
limitParam: when reading (GET) resources as a set, paging can be used by sending a limit, page and start parameters. Sorting can also be used by sending a sorter array param containing objects of the type {property: "...", direction: "asc/desc"}. When describing resources, like in this case, we can specify a limitParam / startParam / pageParam / sortersParam to specify which query string parameter will act as the limit/start/page/sorters param.
fields: a list of field definitions, including name and type. This type can be any of the following: int, string, float, date, boolean and auto (no conversion, used for arrays or objects, for example).
data: an array containing the data representing the model instance currently stored for this resource.

Further development

Modularize more and/or better. Isolate the data reading/modifying so instead of JSON other storage systems can be used (i.e. MySQL, MongoDB, etc.).