Less verbose, better maintenance

All the codes that you will see in this post you can check here

In the last post we delivered the content to response in our controller but the code it's not too readable. In this post, we will refact the code to be more readable and easy to deliver our content.

Inside cmd/http folder we will create a new folder called helper. This package will group functions to help the http layer to deal with request and response that will be used by any other handler in our project.

First of all, lets refact our book handler in cmd/http/book.go and see how our getAll will be

func (h *BookHandler) getAll(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    if results, err := h.bookService.FindAll(); err != nil {
        helper.HandleError(w, err)
    } else {
        if results != nil && len(*results) > 0 {
            helper.JsonResponse(w, results, http.StatusOK)
        } else {
            helper.NoContent(w)
        }
    }
}

Now the helper will help us to deal with error and with the response data.

In the helper package we will create a response.go and will move the addDefaultHeaders and writeData presents in book handler to our response.go file.

3 - We will start to the more easy method here, the NoContent function.

//cmd/http/helper/response.go
//...
func NoContent(w http.ResponseWriter) {
    addDefaultHeaders(w)
    w.WriteHeader(http.StatusNoContent)
}

We just will add the default headers and send a Header to No Content Status.

2 - We will write the json data to response

//cmd/http/helper/response.go
//...
func JsonResponse(w http.ResponseWriter, data interface{}, httpStatus int) {
    addDefaultHeaders(w)
    w.WriteHeader(httpStatus)
    writeData(w, data)
}

Again, we just move the boilerplate code to write data to a new function in helper package.

1 - Now, we will refact our error method to improve the process.

//cmd/http/helper/response.go
//...
func HandleError(w http.ResponseWriter, err error) {
    addDefaultHeaders(w)
    httpError := DealWith(err)
    w.WriteHeader(httpError.Status)

    if httpError.Status != http.StatusNoContent {
        writeData(w, httpError)
    }
}

look that we have a new method called DealWith this method will check if the error is a registered error or an unexpected error to our application.

At the moment we will create an error.go inside helper folder to create the DealWith method for our code works without any error.

//cmd/http/helper/error.go
//...
type HttpError struct {
    Status      int      `json:"-"`
    Description string   `json:"description,omitempty"`
    Messages    []string `json:"messages,omitempty"`
}

func DealWith(err error) HttpError {

    return HttpError{
        Status:      http.StatusInternalServerError,
        Description: "Internal error, please report to admin",
    }
}

In the next post we will describe the DealWith method to know a better way to produce errors in http layer.