POST XML to a Swagger Node Express Application

Question

I'm quite new to Swagger, node and express and now facing a little Problem with XML content in POST requests.

I created a project with swagger project create and selecting express as the framework.

Here is (the interesting part) of my endpoint description I've put in the api/swagger/swagger.yaml :

[...]
consumes:
  - application/xml
  - application/json
produces:
  - application/json
[...]
paths:
  /test:
    x-swagger-router-controller: testctrl
    post:
      description: |
        The endpoint that actually consumes the XML data.
      parameters:
        - name: data
          in: body
          description: The actual data
          required: true
          schema:
            $ref: "#/definitions/MyData"
      responses:
        "200":
          description: Success
          schema:
            type: string

In my api/controller/test.js , I have following function:

module.exports = {
  post: testctrl_post
};

function testctrl_post(req, res) {
  console.log("Received POST request...");
  console.log(req.body);
  // Here I want to do something with XML data.
  res.status(200).json("OK");
}

My problem is, that as soon as I send non-JSON content to the endpoint, the req.body is empty. When I send a JSON like { "test": "test" } , I can see it in body again.

My question is now, how can I get at least the raw body data to process it with some xml module?

Answer 1

Adding the express-xml-bodyparser module by executing:

npm install express-xml-bodyparser

and changing app.js to include the xml parser as follows:

'use strict';

var SwaggerExpress = require('swagger-express-mw');
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var xmlparser = require('express-xml-bodyparser');

module.exports = app; // for testing

var config = {
  appRoot: __dirname // required config
};

app.use(express.json());
app.use(express.urlencoded());
app.use(xmlparser());

SwaggerExpress.create(config, function(err, swaggerExpress) {
  if (err) { throw err; }

  // install middleware
  swaggerExpress.register(app);

  var port = process.env.PORT || 10010;
  app.listen(port);

  if (swaggerExpress.runner.swagger.paths['/hello']) {
    console.log('try this:\ncurl http://127.0.0.1:' + port + '/hello?name=Scott');
  }
});

The stuff works now.