loopback-context

Current context for LoopBack applications, based on cls-hooked.

Main changes in cls-hooked branch

The work-in-progress cls-hooked branch uses cls-hooked NPM package, which in turn uses async-hook. The latter requires Node > 4.5 as specified in its own package.json. This change alone doesn't solve, for now, any problem with loopback-context, especially issues related to lost context (for example see loopback #1495), as far as the writer knows. But it uses Node AsyncWrap, which may have some pros in the long term.

However, as a work-in-progress, this branch also includes the experimental package cls-hooked-interceptor (not ready for production), which should give useful warnings when there is the risk that the context would get lost at runtime. Neither this solves any problem with loopback-context. It's just a work-in-progress that will eventually help with debugging and mantaining apps experiencing such issues, common especially in legacy apps.

Therefore, what is the solution to issues with lost context? For now, you should implement your own solution. For example, the writer uses the npm shrinkwrap solution mentioned in loopback #1495, but even this could be useless for you, in case you get a broken install (this is unpredictable and hard to notice, and this package wants to change that).

To test this branch, just run the tests with npm test. (You will also see a warning from cls-hooked-interceptor, in addition to the test output; this is the desired behavior).

If you want to see all the infos and warnings that cls-hooked-interceptor sends to the debug package, declare the environment variable DEBUG=cls-hooked-interceptor when running the tests.

OS X example:

DEBUG=cls-hooked-interceptor npm test

By default, the test makes the context get lost. If you want to test the opposite case when the package does not warn, because the context is not lost, just declare the environment variable KEEP_CONTEXT=true when running the tests (this variable has no effect outside of tests!).

OS X example:

KEEP_CONTEXT=true npm test

TODO: try to refactor the tests using the package lose-cls-context.

Usage

1. Add per-request-context middleware to your server/middleware-config.json:

{
  "initial": {
    "loopback-context#per-request-context": {
    }
  }
}

2. Then you can access the context from your code:

var LoopBackContext = require('loopback-context');

// ...

MyModel.myMethod = function(cb) {
  var ctx = LoopBackContext.getCurrentContext();
  ctx.get('key');
  ctx.set('key', { foo: 'bar' });
});

See also https://docs.strongloop.com/display/APIC/Using+current+context