AJAX call to make an HTTP request

Question

I am using node.js with express. There is a button that the user can click, and doing so calls this method on the server:

app.get('/getTime', function(req, res) {
 var url = 'http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/api/v1/gettime';
 http.get(url + '?key=' + apikey, function(resp) {
 var xml = '';
 resp.on('data', function(chunk) {
 xml += chunk;
 });
 resp.on('end', function() {
 console.log(xml);
 res.send(xml);
 });
 });
});

This works, strictly speaking, in that the client side does receive the XML data. What bothers me is that there are two response objects that I have only dealt with by calling one "res" and the other "resp". I have a feeling I am handling the callbacks the wrong way, or that the entire structure of this task is done incorrectly.

I would appreciate some guidance about the "right way" to do this, as I am sure this is not it.

Answer 1

Since the HTTP response implements Writable Stream and Express wraps around HTTP, you can pipe the output to the response, like so:

app.get('/getTime', function(req, res) {
 var url = 'http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/api/v1/gettime';
 http.get(url + '?key=' + apikey, function(incoming) {
 incoming.pipe(res);
 }
});

It will not only cut down on latency times but also cut down on lines of code.

• Will: That's excellent, thanks very much. I knew there was something I wasn't quite seeing and this is it.

Answer 2

From a once over:

• Your indenting is off, try something like jsbeautifier.org
• Dont do console.log in production code, it is synchronous and slow
• Other than that your code is very typical, there is nothing obviously wrong

Furthermore, would this work for you ?

app.get('/getTime', function(req, res) {
 var url = 'http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/api/v1/gettime';
 http.get(url + '?key=' + apikey, res);
});

Since you are anyway sending the data thru, I wonder if this would work.