Code generator API client #

Compas can generate api clients from different sources & for different consumers. We can read the OpenAPI specification, or get the Compas structure from a remote Compas based api. We can generate only wrappers around Axios calls, or provide full-fledged react-query hooks.

API functions #

Generating api functions from a remote structure consists of creating a 'generate' script, which reads either a remote api structure or an OpenAPI definition and writes a bunch of TypeScript files to disk. It has the following contents:

// scripts/generate.mjs
import { mainFn } from "@compas/stdlib";
import { App, loadFromRemote } from "@compas/store";
import Axios from "axios";

mainFn(import.meta, main);

async function main() {
  const app = new App();

  // Either:
  // Load the OpenAPI 3.0 based definiotion somehow in to an object
  const openApiDefinition = {};
  // 'serviceName' is used as the function name prefix if the used api definition is not using tags.
  app.extendWithOpenApi("serviceName", openApiDefinition);

  // OR:
  app.extend(
    await loadFromRemote(
      "https://api.example.com", // Base url of the Compas based api
      Axios.create({
        /* ... */
      }),
    ),
  );

  // And finally
  await app.generate({
    outputDirectory: "./src/generated",
    isBrowser: true,
    enabledGenerators: ["type", "apiClient"],
  });
}

After calling node ./scripts/generate.mjs, you should see some files in src/generated.

Generated output #

There are a few cool files to look at;

• src/generated/common/types.ts: this file contains all input and output types used in the project.
• src/generated/xxx/apiClient.ts: these files contain the generated typed api functions. As you can see it wraps the an Axios.request call and returns the response data.

By using your IDE and requesting for autocomplete on apiGroupName you can see all generated api functions.

Introducing react-query #

For projects with React, we also support automatically wrapping the generated api calls in to react-query hooks, using useQuery and useMutations. To enable the react-query generator add "reactQuery" to the enabledGenerators array in scripts/generate.mjs and generate again via node ./scripts/generate.mjs.

This needs some setup to let the generated hooks know which Axios instance to use. You can do that via the exported ApiProvider component, which should be wrapped around the React component tree that uses generated hooks.

Any api GET api call uses useQuery under the hood, and POST, PATCH, PUT & DELETE calls use useMutation which are reflected in the hooks arguments and return types. All hooks also have two special functions:

• useTodoSingle.baseKey(): which returns the root query key without combining any input parameters
• useTodoSingle.queryKey({ /* expects all input params */ }): for a specific query key

With these two you can do custom prefetching, invalidating and optimistic updates. Invalidations can also be defined from the backend router. That is the place where the designers should know which data are mutated and, in turn, which routes should be invalidated. If added, mutation hooks will accept an extra 'hookOptions' object with the option to 'invalidateQueries'. This is off by default. To check which queries are invalidated, look at the source of the generated hook.

GET requests have another speciality generated. An automatic options.enabled. All required param, query and body parameters are used to check if options.enabled should be set to true or false. This way we don't do unnecessary network calls that we know will not succeed.

As with the api functions, use autocomplete on useGroupName to discover the generated functions.