XMLHttpRequest support

[Mr-Wallet]

This is great for electron apps (or basically any situation where you know the code is running in a browser, because you can exploit the browser's proxy resolution and SSL certificates. It's not normally available in Node, however, so it would have to be an option.

We swapped to this package and a few of our users are complaining about failures with self-signed certificates.

Basically this would be a constructor option that switches out the core driver of the requests. We did this on the original repository with a mix of PRs and fork-fixes for its node-slumber dependency. I totally expect to write this myself but I wanted to open the issue in advance to make sure you're amenable to such an extension to this package.

[jdalrymple]

The more functionality the better! Are you sure the default request library doesnt support XMLHttpRequest ?

Not sure if this is helpful: request/request#1267

If we did make the request library optional, we would have abtract out the request calls correct? Most of that is already done, inside the RequestHelper class, but im not sure if the other library supports all the options we use now?

[Mr-Wallet]

Unfortunately the resolution for that issue, "say in the headers that we used XHR", doesn't do anything for us, since the issue isn't convincing the server, it's that we are an electron app and we literally want to use electron's XHR implementation. All proxy/certificate settings are shared among all electron apps, so this means that if they can smoothly browse their gitlab instance (or gitlab.com) in Chrome, then they're already set up for all electron apps, including ours.

I'm going to branch off rc.8, if that seems good to you. I'm thinking this should use Request by default, but if something is constructed with an explicit useXMLHttpRequest: true option, all requests will assume that XMLHttpRequest is available in the current environment and go through that.

[jdalrymple]

Ah, I understand. Yea makes sense!

…

On Apr 2, 2018, 1:46 PM, at 1:46 PM, Jordan Wallet ***@***.***> wrote: Unfortunately the resolution for that issue, "say in the headers that we used XHR", doesn't do anything for us, since the issue is that we are an electron app and we literally want to use electron's XHR implementation. All proxy/certificate settings are shared among all electron apps, so this means that if they can smoothly browse their gitlab instance (or gitlab.com) in Chrome, then they're already set up for all electron apps, including ours. I'm going to branch off `rc.8`, if that seems good to you. I'm thinking this should use `Request` by default, but if something is constructed with an explicit `useXMLHttpRequest: true` option, all requests will assume that XMLHttpRequest is available in the current environment and go through that. -- You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #56 (comment)

[mingyuan-xia]

We faced a similar situation in electron apps where some requests prefer XHR, and others (need streaming) require the node http module. We end up using https://github.com/axios/axios which is a great simplification for http/https, follow-redirects, XHR/node.http, etc. Also it has very few dependencies and the documentation/maintenance is good. We would recommend that to you.
e.g.,

const http_adapter = require('axios/lib/adapters/http');
// by default, axios detects the global window object and use XHR adapter
// http_adapter interfaces node.http
function login_fetch(url, params) { // XHR get, with auth headers
    return axios({method: 'GET', headers: {"Authorization": "Bearer " + token}, params: params, url: url});
}

function login_post(url, data) { // XHR post, with auth headers
    return axios({method: 'POST', headers: {"Authorization": "Bearer " + token}, data: data, url: url});
}

function fetch(url, params) {  // very simple XHR get
    return axios({method: 'GET', params: params, url: url});
}

function post_multipart_form(url, form) { // multipart form for file uploading, using adapter for node http
    return axios.post(url, form, {headers: form.getHeaders(), adapter: http_adapter});
}

Disclaimer: I have no connection with axios development. Just pass on the experience.