Json Verify Option

[alexcurtis]

In express 3.5 we used to have a json verify option. It was quite nice feature to use to get the fully buffered raw body when dealing with facebook X-Hub Signed Requests.
Could we please get this back in? Thanks.

[jonathanong]

it's easier just to create your own special parser with https://github.com/stream-utils/raw-body

[dougwilson]

Also, if you make your own parser you can calculate the sha1 as the response streams in instead of all in one go.

[alexcurtis]

Thanks. I can't seem to get that raw-body parser to work correctly in the express 4 flow.

var rawbody = require('raw-body');
app.use(function (req, res, next) {
        var length = req.header('content-length');
        if(length === undefined) { return next(); }
        rawbody(req, { length: length, encoding: 'utf8'}, function (err, buffer) {
            if (err) { return next(err); }
            var xhub = req.header('X-Hub-Signature');
            if(xhub) { req.rawBody = buffer; }
            return next();
        });
    });
app.use(bodyParser());

[jonathanong]

what's wrong?

[alexcurtis]

I've seen the error of my ways. Its my fault. Thanks.

[chris-rock]

Okay. Assume the simple usecase: You want to send signed Json requests. I need create a new module that parses json and implements the signing. I agree with @dougwilson that it would be nice to use streams and generate the signature on the fly. But since we do not want to reinvent the wheel, it would be great if we have a module to inherit from and keep at least the json part. But the current state of body-parser is not well suited for this task. Do you guys have a good idea how to leverage the knowledge of body-parser for such cases? I do not think, everybody should re-implement a json parser again and again and again.

[dougwilson]

I do not think, everybody should re-implement a json parser again and again and again.

Then make a json parser for the signed requests and put it on npm. Then we can point users to it and other people don't have to implement the signature checking over and over. Us adding a "hook" will still make people re-implement the hmac checking over and over...

[dougwilson]

All this module does is glue together raw-body and JSON.parse

[jonathanong]

yeah there are too many ways to hook stuff. won't be worth it.

what we could do is create another lib body-parse or somehting that just does the parsing in this lib with the error codes. should make creating different middleware easier.