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Introduction

The Request object encapsulates incoming HTTP requests to your Alchemy app. It provides a variety of ways to interact with each request’s content, queries, files, and more. We will discuss a few of the most important methods below.

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Inspecting the Request

A Request object is passed to the handlers of each route you define on your app.

app.get("/") { request in
    let name = request["name"].string
    // ...
}

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Request Path & Method

Each Request instance contains an instance of Foundation’s URLComponents as well as an HTTPMethod, urlComponents and method, respectively. It also contains a few functions and properties for shorthand access to other common values.

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Accessing The Request URL

You can access the complete url of the request using the url field.

let url: URL = request.url

You may also access just the path of the request. In example, the request url is “https://example.com/users/2” path will be /users/2. Note that path will not include any query from the url.

let uri = request.path

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Accessing Parameters

You’ll often have path parameters in your routes, specified on your router by a path component prefixed with a :. To quickly access any path parameters on a request, you may use the parameter() function.

get("/:foo") {
    let foo = request.parameter("foo")
}

You may specific the return type to be any implementation of LosslessStringConvertible (a type that’s initializable from a String). This overload of the function has a throwing interface, and will throw if the parameter doesn’t exist or isn’t convertible.

get("/:foo/:bar/:baz/:tiz") {
    let string = try request.parameter("foo", as: String.self)
    let int = try request.parameter("bar", as: Int.self)
    let uuid = try request.parameter("baz", as: UUID.self)
    let bool = try request.parameter("tiz", as: Bool.self)
}

If you’d like to iterate over each parameter, you may access the parameters property. Each Parameter has a key and value, representing the path placeholder and the actual component string, respectively.

for p in request.parameters {
    print("Parameter \(p.key): \(p.value).")
}

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Retreiving The Request Method

You may access the request’s method via the method property.

let method = request.method

if request.method == .POST {
    //
}

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Request Headers

You can grab a single header value from a request using the header() function.

let authorization = request.header("Authorization")

The header() function returns the first matching header value, if one exists. If you’d like to access multiple values of the same header, you may use the headers parameter, an instance of HTTPHeaders.

// Loop through all X-Foo headers
for value in headers["X-Foo"] {
    print("X-Foo: \(value)")
}

// Loop through all headers on the request
for h in headers {
    print("\(h.name): \(h.value)")
}

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Retrieving Values From The Query String

Values in the query string is easily accessible via the query() function.

let page = request.query("page")

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Request IP Address

You may access the remote address of the incoming response via the remoteAddress field, an instance of swift-nio’s SocketAddress?.

let socket = request.remoteAddress
switch socket {
    case .unixDomainSocket(let path):
        //
    case .v4(let ip):
        //
    case .v6(let ip):
        //
}

If you’d prefer to just access the ip address String, use ip.

let ip = request.ip

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Content

Incoming requests will often have content in the request body. You can access the raw body data via the request.body property, but Alchemy includes a few higher level interfaces for interacting with the request content.

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Decoding Codable Types

Typically, incoming requests will have their body encoded in one of a few common encoding standards, as indicated by the Content-Type header. Out of the box, Alchemy lets you decode Swift Codable types from requests encoded by multipart/form-data, application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and application/json.

struct User: Codable {
    let name: String
    let age: Int
    let birthday: Date
}

let user: User = try jsonEncodedRequest.decode(User.self)

The decode() function automatically detects the right decoder to use based on the Content-Type header, but you may pass it a specific decoder if you’d like to specify additional options.

let formDecoder = URLEncodedFormDecoder(dateDecodingStrategy: .iso8601)
let user: User = try formEncodedRequest.decode(User.self, with: formDecoder)

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Writing A Custom Decoder

If you’d like to use the decoding APIs with a unsupported content type, you’ll need to write a custom implementation of ContentDecoder and pass it to the decode() function.

struct XMLDecoder: ContentDecoder { ... }

let user: User = xmlEncodedRequest.decode(User.self, with: XMLDecoder())

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Accessing Specific Fields

While decoding can be a great way to quickly validate incoming requests against a complicated schema, it can be brittle and requires a custom type for decoding all types. To simplify cases where you only need a single field or two, you may use the Content API, which seamlessly integrates a dictionary-like lookup style and Swift’s Codable.

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Retreiving Content At A Specific Path

You may access a request’s content with the content() function or through subscripting directly on Request. Subscripts can be either Strings for fields or Ints for array index access.

let page = request.content()["page"]
let page = request["page"]
let user = request["users"][0]

You may also use dynamic member lookup.

let name = request.users.0.name

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Checking If A Value Exists

You may confirm that a value exists at the given path using the exists property.

if request.users[10].exists {
    //
}

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Checking For Null

A value that exists but is null can be checked for using the isNull property.

guard !request.users[0].address.city.isNull else {
    //
}

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Retrieving Data

Once you’ve accessed the content at the proper path, there are a few variables and functions to help convert that data to a desired type.

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Retreiving A Value

You may retrive a value from the content at a specific path using the string, int, bool, double, and array properties. Each has a throwing version as well.

let name: String? = request.users[0].name.string
let age: String? = request.users[0].age.int
let isAdmin: Bool? = request.users[0].isAdmin.bool
let height: Double? = request.users[0].height.double
let users: [Content]? = request.users.array

Each property has a throwing version as well that throws if there is an error converting or if the value doesn’t exist.

let name: String = try request.users[0].name.stringThrowing
let age: String = try request.users[0].age.intThrowing

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Decoding A Value

You may also combine the dynamic interface of Content with the typesafe interface of Codable by calling decode() on content at the given path.

let user: User = try request.users[0].decode(User.self)

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Dot Notation

When working with content that’s an array, you may subscript with the * operator to “flatten” it, often called “dot” notation. This returns an array of Content and subsequent subscripts will be applied to each element.

let userNames: [String]? = request.users[*].name.string

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Dictionaries / Objects

Dot notation is also applicable to dictionaries/objects in your content, and will map each key/value pair to the value.

/*
 {
     "foo": "value",
     "bar": 2,
     "baz": false,
 }
 */
let request = ...

let values: [Content]? = request[*]
values![0].string // "value"
values![1].int // 2
values![2].bool // false

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Files

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Retrieving Uploaded Files

You may quickly retrieve any files uploaded as part of the request using the file() method, or by using the file/fileThrowing properties on Content. These return an instance of type File which provides a variety of utilities for interacting with the file.

let file: File? = request.file("photo")

let file: File? = request.photo.file

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Accessing The File Content Type

If the file was uploaded with a Content-Type header, you may access it with the contentType property.

let contentType = request.file("photo").contentType

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Storing Uploaded Files

To store an uploaded file, you’ll want to put it in one of your filesystems. You can use File’s store() function to do so easily. It accepts an optional directory to put the file in, as well as an optional id of the filesystem to store in. By default, it will be stored in your default filesystem.

try await request.file("photo").store()

try await request.file("photo").store(in: "users/photos")

try await request.file("photo").store(in: "users/photos", on: .s3)