Middlewares

If you've used libraries like Express and Koa, or Redux, you were also probably already familiar with the concept of middleware. In these frameworks, a middleware is some code you can put between the framework receiving a request, and the framework generating a response. For example, Express or Koa middleware may add CORS headers, logging, compression, and more. The best feature of middleware is that it's composable in a chain. You can use multiple independent third-party middlewares in a single project.

The SDK middlewares work similarly to those concepts. Given an initial request and response definition, each middleware can do "side effects" and "transform" those objects, passing them to the next middleware in the chain. This provides a third-party extension point for handling HTTP requests. For example, there are middlewares for doing authentication, for logging, for actually making the HTTP request, for retrying failed requests, etc.

The most important thing is the contract the middlewares have between each other: the request and response objects passed to each middleware have a well predefined shape, known to each middleware. This is important to ensure that middlewares can do side effects on those objects.

Middlewares API

A Middleware is a higher-order function that composes a dispatch function to return a new dispatch function.

const middleware = (next) => (request, response) => next(request, response)

The dispatch function accepts 2 arguments: request and response objects. After doing the side effects, the middleware should call next, passing the (mutated) request and response to the next middleware.

Implement a logging middleware

Let's see a simple practical example: a middleware that logs the incoming request and response objects.

const loggerMiddleware = (next) => (request, response) => {
  const { statusCode, body, error } = response
  console.log('Request:', request)
  console.log('Response:', { statusCode, body, error })
  next(request, response)
}

See official middlewares for more advanced examples.