Import http file

[Huachao]

Copied from @rdumont #182 (comment)

The statement syntax
I would prefer to follow the pattern of prefixing keywords with @ inside a comment like it is done with @name. So what do you think about the following?

@import './login.http'

GET {{url}}/api/list HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer {{login.response.body.$.data.id}}
The keyword name
I see that we have a few options: include, import, require.

My personal preference is for include, since this is basically going to be treated like a preprocessor include, as if we had copied and pasted the code into the new file. Any objections?

The tasks
Introduce include/import/require resolution to the send request command
Update http language definition to support the new include/import/require statement
Document usage in the readme
(optional) offer auto-complete for included file paths
Corner cases
Nested includes: can we agree that file paths will always be relative to each file that called the @include statement?
Anything else?

[rdumont]

Thanks for bringing this to a discussion, @Huachao! I'm bringing my comment back here, but with the original formatting:

---

The statement syntax

I would prefer to follow the pattern of prefixing keywords with @ inside a comment, like it is done with @name. So what do you think about the following?

# @import './login.http'

GET {{url}}/api/list HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer {{login.response.body.$.data.id}}

The keyword name

I see that we have a few options: include, import, require.

My personal preference is for include, since this is basically going to be treated like a preprocessor include, as if we had copied and pasted the code into the new file. Any objections?

The tasks

• Introduce include/import/require resolution to the send request command
• Update http language definition to support the new include/import/require statement
• Document usage in the readme
• (optional) offer auto-complete for included file paths

Corner cases

• Nested includes: can we agree that file paths will always be relative to each file that called the @include statement?

Anything else?

[Marvin-Brouwer]

I really like the idea of not having to duplicate my auth for all the files but there's one thing I'm not happy with when reading the draft.
I see the idea is to implicitly call the imported file and in that case, I don't think that requre, import or include describes what it's doing.

I'd expect it to actually import a callable thing.

So for example:

# login.http

###
# @name GetLoginToken
###

GET https://api.someapi.com/api/v1/authenticate HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Encoding: deflate
Cache-Control: no-store, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, no-cache, max-age=0

{
   token: "asdfkjaoi"
}

###

And then import it like this:

# example.http
# @import './login.http'

### 
# @name DoSomething
###

GET {{url}}/api/list HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer {{GetLoginToken().response.body.$.data.id}}
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Encoding: deflate
Cache-Control: no-store, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, no-cache, max-age=0

###

The difference here is that it looks like GetLoginToken() which is the named request but the () indicates an invocation.
Which in turn also means you can decide whether to assign to a variable once or recall the auth call every request, which is very useful for refresh tokens for example,