snd-api-js

sndapi.js is Schibsted Norge Digital news API utility library to access the API from JavaScript. It only manages the tokens thrown back and forth for authorization of the requests. If you are looking for a full-blown NewsClient SDK for JavaScript, you may want to try (work in progress) the snd-api-newsclient-js project.

The name in probably misleading because of this, we know. Unforeseen project decisions.

It is lightweight (only 3.8 KiB when minified, 2.2 KiB to download!) and very simple to use (construct, init, ajax!). It has no external dependencies and requires CORS-aware browser — consult http://caniuse.com/cors if in doubt.

Installation

You can either:

• include the JavaScript file before you use it with a script tag or
• install it as a bower package

bower

If you use bower, you can install this package via package name from bower registry:

bower install snd-api-js

It should include the minified output file and some documentation in your bower_components directory:

    ➜  your_project $  tree bower_components -L 2
    bower_components
    `-- snd-api-js
        |-- README.md
        |-- bower.json
        |-- docs
        |-- sndapi.js
        `-- sndapi.min.js

Usage

Then, in your code, you create an instance of SNDAPI object (providing at least your API client id key, for more options refer to the JSDoc in docs directory), initialize it and there make AJAX calls in a familiar way:

    var api = new SNDAPI({
        key: "your123secret789key" // also known as client ID in some docs.
    });
    api.init(); // This makes a HTTP request! You can also attach .success and .fail here
    api.ajax({ url: "publication/common/sections/1/auto" })
        .success(function(data, statusDetails) {
            console.log("HTTP response code: " + statusDetails.statusCode);
            console.log("HTTP status text:   " + statusDetails.statusText);
            ok(data === statusDetails.response);
            ok(data, "data received");
        })
        .fail(function(statusDetails) {
            console.error("request failed");
            console.error("Response code: " + statusDetails.statusCode);
        });

More documentation

JSDoc is generated with gulp-jsdoc and can be viewed in the docs/SNDAPI.html. Because of most git repo viewers' security limitations, it's best viewed offline, from your hard disk.

Contributing and building

npm and gulp are required to build this project. Then just run

gulp

and the build/sndapi.min.js file should be updated (and the tests run, and the filesystem watched for changes). If you don't want waching for changes and want to build+test only once, use gulp once.

We use semantic versioning which is made easy with the following commands:

gulp patch # after you patched a bug in a backwards-compatible manner
gulp feature # after you added a new feature that doesn't break backward-compatibility, bumps minor version
gulp release # after you created a new backwards-incompatible release, bumps major version number

These will bump the version both in package.json and bower.json, tag the repository and push the tags. The commands are more documented in the gulpfile.

Testing

That's under development. You can simply run gulp test or npm test now, but it doesn't finish the process automatically yet. Tests are written for QUnit and placed in sndapi-test.js file.

Unfortunately right now the gulp-qunit plugin didn't seem to accept a HTTP protocol URL as the argument, only a local file, and when it uses a local file, its PhantomJS doesn't resolve other local files referenced by just src="qunit.js" and such (though might be fixed by gulp-qunit pull request #8). Therefore we start an Express server that hosts the test files and provides simple mock responses that the real API server should return. The tests will be changed to use this server instead of the real one (that does not work, he he).

To serve everything that's required and run the tests, run:

    gulp test

It will use port 8081 for serving content to PhantomJS with QUnit.