How can I use body-parser with LoopBack?

Question

I see that LoopBack has the Express 3.x middleware built-in. Indeed, body-parser is in loopback/node_modules. But I cannot figure out how to use it as middlewar

Answer 1

Based on this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/29813184/605586 from Ben Carlson you have to

npm install --save body-parser multer

then in your server.js require the modules:

var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var multer = require('multer');

and use them before app.start:

app.use(bodyParser.json()); // for parsing application/json
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true })); // for parsing application/x-www-form-urlencoded
app.use(multer().any()); // for parsing multipart/form-data

Then you can create a remote method:

App.incoming = function (req, cb) {
    console.log(req);
    // the files are available as req.files.
    // the body fields are available in req.body
    cb(null, 'Hey there, ' + req.body.sender);
}
App.remoteMethod(
    'incoming',
    {
    accepts: [
        {
        arg: 'req', type: 'object', http: function (ctx) {
            return ctx.req;
        }
        }],
    returns: { arg: 'summary', type: 'string' }
    }
);

Using this you can upload files and additional data fields to loopback with multipart/form-data.