Can't access parsed JSON in Coffeescript with Hubot

Question

I am writing a script for my company's Rocket Chat server using hubot. As a learning step, I decided to try getting API data from forecast.io and output certain members to the user. However, my bot will not output the JSON no matter what I try. When I try sending the entire body it only says "[object Object]" and when I try to output certain members it either send "undefined" or it doesn't send anything at all. Also, I have tried using syntax like "json['member']['member']" and like "json.member.member" (and I have seen both on the internet) and neither has worked. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. (NOTE: I did not include my API key which is written in the code as FORECAST_KEY)

SOLVED : I did not fully understand what node.js is all about. Node.js is event-based , meaning that it performs actions when events occur instead of performing actions in a linear order.

My problem here was that there was latency between the return of the data and the return of the function. More simply, the request wasn't completed until after the function had already returned the container, which was empty. The problem resided in me using a separate function instead of including the request straight in the code.

module.exports = (robot) ->
    robot.hear /weather/i, (res) ->
        testurl = "https://api.forecast.io/forecast/#{FORECAST_KEY}/37,-10"
        data = httpRequest(robot, testurl, res)
        res.send("Checking Weather...")
        res.send("#{data['latitude']}")
        res.send("#{data.latitude}")

httpRequest = (robot, url, topRes) ->
    topRes.http(url)
        .get() (err, res, body) ->
            #If error, display error
            if err
                topRes.send("Bot Encountered an Error :: #{err}")
            else
                #Try to parse JSON
                tryBody = body
                try
                    data = JSON.parse(tryBody)
                catch e
                    #Catch error, return plain body
                    return body
                #If not error, return JSON
                return data

Answer 1

Did you try adding a log statement in the httpRequest function? The httpRequest is a named function and have to be declared ahead of making a call to it.

Change the code to:

httpRequest = (robot, url, topRes) ->
  topRes.http(url)
    .get() (err, res, body) ->
        #If error, display error
        if err
            topRes.send("Bot Encountered an Error :: #{err}")
        else
            #Try to parse JSON
            tryBody = body
            try
                data = JSON.parse(tryBody)
            catch e
                #Catch error, return plain body
                return body
            #If not error, return JSON
            return data

module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.hear /weather/i, (res) ->
    testurl = "https://api.forecast.io/forecast/#{FORECAST_KEY}/37,-10"
    data = httpRequest(robot, testurl, res)
    res.send("Checking Weather...")
    res.send("#{data['latitude']}")
    res.send("#{data.latitude}")

Reference: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/191196/coffeescript-and-named-functions

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Phani.