PopIt Toolkit

Utility library for populating your PopIt instance.

What is PopIt? Check the PopIt site

This node module contains some functions used to interact with PopIt instances.

In particular, it provides a way for inserting large sets of items and also getting all the items in any one of the collections.

Installation

npm install popit-toolkit

Usage

var toolkit = require('popit-toolkit');

// Set initial values & config

toolkit.config({
	host: 'cargografias.popit.mysociety.org', 
	user: 'username',       // optional if not going to write to the api
	password: 'password'    // optional if not going to write to the api
});


// To batch insert organizations

var itemsToPost = [];

itemsToPost.push({ name : "Organization 1" });
itemsToPost.push({ name : "Organization 2" });

toolkit.postItems('organizations', itemsToPost).then(
	function(){
		console.log('all requests POSTed to the server');
	},
	function(err){
		console.log('error', err);
	},
	function(progress){
		// progress will contain the server response for each POSTed item. (as string)
		console.log(progres);
	}
);


// To get all the items in the persons collection

toolkit.loadAllItems('persons').then(
	function(persons){ 
		console.log('total persons', persons.length)
	}, 
	function(err){
		console.log('error', err);
	}, 
	function(progress){
		console.log(progress); //This will bring information about the number of 'pages' that will be retrieved to get the complete collection.
	}
);

Why should I use this?

Insert faster: if you need to insert 2000 records, it can take a while to insert them sequentially. Also, if you open 2000 simultaneous connections time-outs may ocurr. This library will issue 50 simultaneous requests max. Once any of those 50 slots gets freed only then a new request will be sent.

Retrieve faster: the api will list results in a paginated fashion, 200 items per page max. If you want to retrieve all the records in a collection, the naive implementation may request page after page until the has_more property is false. Instead, this library will calculate the number of pages and request all the pages simultaneously. For long round-trip times, this makes a difference.

Function Reference

.config(configOptions)

This method initializes the library and sets the credentials that will be used for writing to the API.

configOptions = {
	host: 'cargografias.popit.mysociety.org', 
	user: 'username',       // optional if not going to write to the api
	password: 'password'    // optional if not going to write to the api	
}

collectionType: can be one of these 4 values -> [ 'persons', 'organizations', 'posts', 'memberships' ]

.postItems(collectionType, itemsToPost).then(successCallback, errorCallback, progressCallack)

.loadAllItems(collectionType).then(successCallback, errorCallback, progressCallack)