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Fetching Data Using http

Fetching Data Using http

This processor is used to initialise some fastn variable with content of JSON fetched from HTTP.
⚠️
Static Vs Dynamic
This feature works better with dynamic hosting. If you are using fastn in static site mode, then how the page looked when fastn build was called will be shown to everyone. But if you are using dynamic mode then this page would be regenerated on every page load.
Consider this data type:
-- record repo:
string full_name:
string description:
string html_url:
integer stargazers_count:
integer watchers_count:

-- record result:
integer total_count: 0
repo list items:
Lang:
ftd

We have two records: repo, and result. We also have a variable of type result.

Lets initialise this variable with result of fetching the top repositories from Github:
-- import: fastn/processors as pr

-- result r:
$processor$: pr.http
url: https://api.github.com/search/repositories
sort: stars
order: desc
q: language:rust
Lang:
ftd

url: string

This is the URL where we would be fetching the JSON from. It is mandatory.

method: optional string

This is the method of the http request. It's an optional field with get as default value. Currently only two methods are supported: get and post

Key: Value pairs

Each key value pair is passed added to the URL as query params, if http request method is get. Otherwise, the pair is passed as the request body.
-- string amit-bio:

I am Amit.

-- person amit:
$processor$: pr.http
method: post
name: "Amit"
age: 33
bio: $amit-bio
Lang:
ftd
For post method, the above code would convert into the following request body:
{
    "name": "Amit",
    "age": 33,
    "bio": "I am Amit."
}
Lang:
json

Currently, there is no way to specify the type of the body parameters, so you need to use " to pass the value as a string type, or you can define any variable and pass it as a reference since the type of the variable is known.

The response of the JSON must match with type of the variable where we are storing the result, here it is r of type record result defined above.