HTTP/S Calls

CFML makes it really easy to interact with any HTTP/S endpoint via the cfhttp tag/construct (https://cfdocs.org/cfhttp). The cfhttp call will generate an HTTP/S request and parse the response into a nice CFML structure.

cfhttp( url="https://www.google.com/", result="result" ){
    cfhttpparam( name="q", type="formfield", value="cfml" )
}
writeDump( result )

You can use ANY http method in the cfhttp calls, the default is a GET operation.

As you can see from the example above, you can pass parameters to the HTTP request by using the child cfhttpparam construct. This parameter can be of many different types: header, body, xml, cgi, file, url, formfield, cookie depending on the requirements of the http endpoint.

The Result Structure

The result structure will contain the following keys:

Key	Description
statusCode	The HTTP response code and reason string.
fileContent	The body of the HTTP response. Usually a string, but could also be a Byte Array.
responseHeader	A structure of response headers, the keys are header names and the values are either the header value or an array of values if multiple headers with the same name exist.
errorDetail	An error message if applicable.
mimeType	The mime type returned in the Content-Type response header.
text	A boolean indicateing if the response body is text or binary
charset	The character set returned in the Content-Type header.
header	All the http response headers as a single string.

CFHTTP Arguments

This construct accepts many arguments with different features you can use when executing http/s calls, below we list just the most common ones, you can find them all here: https://cfdocs.org/cfhttp

Argument	Type	Default	Description
url	URL		The http/s endpoint to hit
port	numeric	80/443	The port of the endpoint to hit. 80 for http and 443 for https
method	string	GET	The http method to use.
username	string		An optional server username
password	string		An optional server password
useragent	string	ColdFusion	The user agent to simulate for the request
charset	string	utf-8	The encoding to use
resolveUrl	boolean	false	No does not resolve URLs in the response body. As a result, any relative URL links in the response body do not work. Yes resolves URLs in the response body to absolute URLs, including the port number, so that links in a retrieved page remain functional.
redirect	boolean	true	If the response header includes a Location field, determines whether to redirect execution to the URL specified in the field.
timeout	numeric	unlimited	A value in seconds of the max time to take for the request.
getAsBinary	string	auto	If yes, convert to CFML binary type, No keep as text, auto let CFML detect and convert as necessary
result	string	cfhttp	The name of the variable you want the result structured returned into
multipart	boolean	false	Tells ColdFusion to send all data specified by cfhttpparam type="formField" tags as multipart form data, with a Content-Type of multipart/form-data.

Basically, you can do any type of http/s calls and consume any type of RESTFul webservices with a nice CFML syntax!

CFHTTPParam

As mentioned before in our example we can use the cfhttpparam construct to pass parameters to the http/s endpoint. The parameters can be of different types as we can see in the following table.

cfhttpParam( type="", name="", value="", file="", encoded="", mimetype="" );

Param Types

Type	Description
header	Specifies an HTTP header. Does not URL encode the value
body	Specifies that the value is the body of the HTTP request.
xml	Identifies the request as having a content-type of text/xml and specifies that the value attribute contains the body of the HTTP request.
cgi	Same as header but URL encodes the value by default.
file	Tells CFML to send the contents of the specified file.
url	Specifies a URL query string name-value pair to append to the cfhttp url attribute. URL encodes the value.
formfield	Specifies a form field to send. URL encodes the value by default.
cookie	Specifies a cookie to send as an HTTP header. URL encodes the value.

Param Arguments

The available param arguments to the cfhttpparam construct are:

Argument	Type	Default	Description
type	string		The type of data from the available types above
name	string		The variable name for the data
value	string		The value of the variable
file	path		Applies to file type; ignored for all other types. The absolute path to the file that is sent with the request.
encoded	boolean	false	Applies to formfield and cgi types; ignored for all other types. Specifies whether to URLEncode the form field or header.
mimetype	string		Applies to file type; invalid for all other types. Specifies the MIME media type of the file contents. The content type can include an identifier for the character encoding of the file; for example, text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 indicates that the file is HTML text in the ISO Latin-1 character encoding.

Here is another example for you:

cfhttp( url="https://myrestapp.com/user", result="local.result", method="post" ){
        cfhttpparam( name="x-api-token", type="header", value="123" )
        cfhttpparam( 
                type="body", 
                value=serializeJson( '{
                        name : "luis",
                         age : 2
                }' )
        )
}
writeDump( result )

Hyper : HTTP Builder

Leveraging cfhttp is very very easy to use. However, it can be cumbersome and not necessarily fluent or object oriented. For this, we have provided a module called Hyper which can help you build fluent and amazing HTTP Builders (https://forgebox.io/view/hyper)

Hyper was built after coding several API SDK's for various platforms — S3SDK, cbstripe, and cbgithub, to name a few. I noticed that I spent a lot of time setting up the plumbing for the requests and a wrapper around cfhttp. Each implementation was mostly the same but slightly different. It was additionally frustrating because I really only needed to tweak a few values, usually just the Authorization header. It would be nice to create an HTTP client pre-configured for each of these SDK's. It seemed the perfect fit for a module.

The problem it solves

Hyper exists to provide a fluent builder experience for HTTP requests and responses. It also provides a powerful way to create clients, Bulider objects with pre-configured defaults like a base URL or certain headers.

HyperBuilder

The component you will most likely inject is the HyperBuilder. This is commonly aliased as hyper.

component {
    property name="hyper" inject="HyperBuilder@Hyper";
}

The HyperBuilder creates new requests. This can be done in one of two ways:

1. Calling the new method will create a new request with the configured defaults.

2. Calling any method on HyperRequest on the HyperBuilder instance will create a new request and forward on the method call.

Using the HyperBuilder lets you easily create requests with defaults while also avoiding having to deal with providers directly.

HyperRequest

Though the HyperBuilder is the component you will most likely inject, HyperRequest is the component will you interact with the most. HyperRequest provides a fluent interface to configure your HTTP call.

Example:

hyper.get( "https//api.github.com/users" );

hyper.setMethod( "PUT" )
    .withHeaders( { "Authorization" = "Bearer #token#" } )
    .setUrl( "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1" )
    .setBody( {
        title: "New Title"
    } )
    .send();

Request Defaults

Hyper allows you to configure defaults for your requests. This is particularly useful for reducing boilerplate in your application.

Defaults are set on the HyperBuilder instance. The easiest way to do this is to configure it in WireBox:

// config/WireBox.cfc
component {

    function configure() {
        map( "StarWarsClient" )
            .to( "hyper.models.HyperBuilder" )
            .asSingleton()
            .initWith(
                baseUrl = "https://swapi.co/api"
            );
    }

}

Now, you can inject this pre-configured builder wherever you need in your application:

component {

    property name="StarWarsClient" inject="id";

    function findUser( id ) {
        return StarWarsClient.get( "/people/#id#" );
    }

}

You can even create multiple clients using this approach:

// config/WireBox.cfc
component {

    function configure() {
        map( "SWAPIClient" )
            .to( "hyper.models.HyperBuilder" )
            .asSingleton()
            .initWith(
                baseUrl = "https://swapi.co/api"
            );

        map( "GitHubClient" )
            .to( "hyper.models.HyperBuilder" )
            .asSingleton()
            .initWith(
                baseUrl = "https://api.github.com",
                headers = {
                    "Authorization" = getSetting( "SWAPI_TOKEN" )
                }
            );
    }

}

You can also set or change the defaults by either passing the key / value pairs in to the init method or by calling the appropriate HyperRequest method on the HyperBuilder.defaults property.

var hyper = new Hyper.models.HyperBuilder(
    baseUrl = "https://api.github.com"
);
hyper.defaults.withHeaders( { "Authorization" = token } );