I am toying around with all the fancy node.js/mongodb/express platforms, and stumbled across a problem:
app.get('/tag/:tag', function(req, res){
var tag=req.params.tag;
console.log('got tag ' + tag + '.');
catalog.byTag(tag,function(err,cursor) {
if(err) {
console.dir(err);
res.end(err);
} else {
res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'application/json'});
//this crashes
cursor.stream().pipe(res);
}
});
});
As you probably guessed, catalog.byTag(tag, callback)
does a find()
query to Mongodb and returns the cursor
This leads to an error:
TypeError: first argument must be a string or Buffer
According to mongodb driver doc,
I tried to pass this converter to stream()
:
function(obj) {return JSON.stringify(obj);}
but that does not help.
Can anybody tell me how to correctly stream something to a response?
Or is the only solution a boilerplate to manually pump the data using the 'data' and 'end' events?
A working combination of other answers here
app.get('/comments', (req, res) => {
Comment.find()
.cursor()
.pipe(JSONStream.stringify())
.pipe(res.type('json'))
})
http://mongoosejs.com/docs/api.html#query_Query-cursor
cursor()
returns a Node streams3 compatible stream and is preferred over the deprecated query.stream()
interface.
- Piping to
JSONStream.stringify()
to combine documents into an array instead of single objects
- Piping to
res.type('json')
which sets the HTTP Content-Type
header to application/json
and returns itself (the response stream) again.
Use the cursor stream in combination with JSONStream
to pipe it to your response object.
cursor.stream().pipe(JSONStream.stringify()).pipe(res);
Simple. .stream({transform: JSON.stringify});
Your mongo stream is dumping objects into the res stream which can only handle strings or buffers (hence the error).
Luckily, streams are easy to pipe together so its not too hard to make a transform stream to stringify your data.
in node v0.10.21:
var util = require('util')
var stream = require('stream')
var Transform = stream.Transform
util.inherits(Stringer, Transform)
function Stringer() {
Transform.call(this, { objectMode: true } )
// 'object mode allows us to consume one object at a time
}
Stringer.prototype._transform = function(chunk, encoding, cb) {
var pretty = JSON.stringify(chunk, null, 2)
this.push(pretty) // 'push' method sends data down the pike.
cb() // callback tells the incoming stream we're done processing
}
var ss = new Stringer()
db.createObjectStreamSomehow()
.pipe(ss)
.pipe(res)
hope that helps
Using mongoose and express:
function(req, res){
var stream = database.tracks.find({}).stream();
stream.on('data', function (doc) {
res.write(JSON.stringify(doc));
});
stream.on('end', function() {
res.end();
});
}