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REST Module

Overview

Nitrogen's default route handler gives you an easy way to add a no-nonsense RESTful handler to a page module. If you need to add a simple a RESTful interface without wanting to deal with Webmachine or Cowboy's restful handlers, and just use straight up Nitrogen, you can do this trivially.

Simply stated, if you add -behaviour(nitrogen_rest). to a module, instead of looking for a main() function as the entry point, it will instead expect an entry point based on the HTTP request method used. So a GET request will look for a get() function, and so on.

Each Entry Point function expects a single argument, PathInfo, which is exactly yhe same information that would be retrieved from calling wf:path_info().

Request Methods Module Entry Points

Commonly used Request methods and their corresponding entry points

• GET :: get(PathInfo)
• POST :: post(PathInfo)
• PUT :: put(PathInfo)
• DELETE :: delete(PathInfo)

Less commonly used Request methods:

• CONNECT :: connect(PathInfo)
• TRACE :: trace(PathInfo)
• OPTIONS :: options(PathInfo)

(You might notice the pattern here: the HTTP status code is made lower-case and converted to an atom, and that is the function called.

Return values of entry points

All the above functions are expected to return either a Body, which can be a typical Nitrogen body (with Nitrogen elements), or a 2-tuple, {StatusCode, Body}, where StatusCode is the HTTP status code of the return. If only a Body is returned, the StatusCode is the standard 200 status code.

See Also

• Route Handler Docs

• REST Handler Demo