Passing a boolean value

[expressjs]

Passing a boolean value

[dougwilson]

You can 100% pass in bools using JSON with this library. Here is an example:

var bodyParser = require('body-parser')
var express = require('express')
var util = require('util')

var app = express()

app.post('/', bodyParser.json(), function (req, res) {
  res.type('text')
  res.write('request posted the following:\n')
  res.write(util.inspect(req.body) + '\n')

  res.write('and the archive property is a ' + typeof req.body.archive + '\n')
  res.end()
})

app.listen(3000)

Then make a JSON post:

curl -XPOST -H'Content-Type: application/json' -d'{"archive":false,"foo":"bar"}' http://localhost:3000/
request posted the following:
{ archive: false, foo: 'bar' }
and the archive property is a boolean

Most likely you are not actually sending JSON like you think you are (you can verify using HTTP sniffing like Fiddler or something similar) or you are sending JSON, but something on your client is changing the boolean to a string and it's being sent over the wire as {"archive":"false"} (you can also verify this using something like Fiddler).

[dougwilson]

Hi @qwemaze, I'm not sure what the comment you made means. This is body-parser, which only parses request bodies, thus it of course wouldn't parse req.query, that would be non-sense. The urlencoded format is parsed by the qs module, so you can always bring up the issue there and whatever changes they make we'll pull in here.

[efkan]

I should to learn a lot of things :)
I've learned today that;
Nobody passes a bool or numeric value to Node.js using REST API. Because it works with strings.
Therefore, there are lots of ODM (Object Document Mapper) tools.

Hopefully you will say "you're wrong. You can".. Otherwise, I have to re-write my controllers using Mangoose :)

I'm closing the issue. Thanks again..

[qwelias]

@dougwilson yeah, but it'll only work with PUT/POST requests, because bodyParser.json doesn't parse req.query, and bodyParser.urlencoded doesn't seem to parse numbers/booleans.