Advice needed on microservices and JSON API - displaying errors

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
1

Hi, this forum has been such a great help.

Will like to seek clarity on two issues. Will love some correction on my terminology and all also.

  1. I have read as much as I can on microservices and all. Are microservices just simply moving things out of web controllers and exposing them as JSON APIs as far as possible. So even to create a new record, it will be handled by a microservice exposed as a /create endpoint?

  2. As things are moved to JSON API endpoints, how does one use the :put_flash? Sure the JSON API can return an error tuple but what happens next? I have been using plain vanilla javascript to inject the error into the .innerHTML of the HTML elements formerly used by :put_flash.

I am thinking that the way it should work is
The JSON endpoint generates the status code along with the message be it a success or error.
The client-facing webpage has a javascript routine to process the received message and renders the success or error.

Please correct me if im way off here. Many thanks.

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2

  1. There should be more than just moving things… a microservice should be autonomous, and have it’s own database. It’s not even clear You want to use REST api to communicate between services, some may use Event bus, or pubsub.

  2. It’s true put_flash has no use in case of JSON api.

It’s one of the case where I would choose an umbrella application.

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3

Thank you so much. There are simply too many buzzwords and people just need to wade through all of them as they settle down and make serious stuff beyond simple tutorials and throwaway single-user applications.

Basically some background for you as you helped…

I was just confused about microservices and JSON API endpoints until I realize microservices are just the “end goal” while what I am doing building JSON API endpoints are actually part of achieving that. I doubt I am that adept to explore other less well documented patterns such as event bus and pubsub though I have heard good things about them

  1. Thank you. I was so disconcerted that JSON APIs cant even use put_flash and I was thinking of a convoluted way such as a handoff mechanism between a JSON API and conventional HTML routes. But i figured that it is overly… complex. So Im using plain vanilla javascript to process JSON responses and display the errors.

I look forward to being of assistance to you should you should ever have questions more in the business domain and etc.

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4

Everything is a fair game. Last I had to devise such an API on my own, I just did this:

{
  "errors": [
    {"username": "must be more than 3 characters"},
    {"password": "must include a special symbol"}
  ]
}

Not sure I understand your conundrum though. Do you seek general advice or particular Phoenix implementation techniques? If it’s the former, don’t bother. Do it the way you feel is right.

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