NOTICE: Owl Cafe is marking this as Legacy use and is or has already phased out it's usage. We have migrated aspects involving http outside of garry's mod and as such this is nolonger needed. We are keeping it here for research purposes.

Why this was created and what is it's purpose

In front end development there are useful libraries that can be used in place of fetch( url ).then( ... ), they make web development a little easier when dealing with APIs and handle certain things for you so that you can focus and building your components for your apps. In web development we also have libraries for caching data for periods of time and only updating the data after a certain amount of time has passed. And finally in garry's mod there is the hook library which allows us to setup functions that get called when events get triggered and to create our own custom events which we can make the game call aswell.

This library attempts to provide a hybrid of these things for Garry's Mod with minimal impact to performance and to make maintaining projects using it more easily and efficiently, allowing you to focuse more on creating addons and gamemodes and less time having to write out your own way of interacting with your webAPI.

What this is meant to be used for

For publicly usable APIs and retrieving data that needs to be cached and updated in intervals, and to do so with most of the logic behind it already written for you.

What this is not meant to be used for

Dealing with anything that requires authentication or authorization. You will need to implement these two things yourself. This may change later but for now this is not something I have the time or motivation to bother with.

Features

1. Built in type checking for parameters passed to it's functions
2. Default headers setup aswell as optional per-route headers
3. Automatically setup to check for errors on response
4. Built in optional caching of responses with cacheTTL
5. Traditional lua library usage and Short hand usage options
6. Built in error handling and warnings to inform developer when they have done something incorrectly and how to resolve it

Usage

Make sure that you run api.SetURL( "your url here" ) before attempting to use api.Call( ... ) otherwise the library will intentionally refuse to attempt making any requests as it would simply error anyways without a set url.

api.Add( id, route, cback, onError, cacheTTL, customHeaders )

Used to create a new API method

PARAMETER	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
id	string	The ID for the method to created
route	string	The route for the API to use
cback	function	The callback function to run when the API responds
onError	function	A callback function for custom error handling
cacheTTL	number	Amount of seconds to cache the response from the API
customHeaders	table	Optional custom http headers to use for the route. will overide default API headers

api.Remove( id )

Used to remove an API method

PARAMETER	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
id	string	The method to be removed

api.Call( id, params )

Used to call an API method

Shorthand way to call a method would be api( id, params )

PARAMETER	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
id	string	The method to run
params	table	The parameters to pass to the API route

api.GetTable()

Used to get the API method table

api.SetUrl( url )

Used to set the current API url

PARAMETER	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
url	string	The url for the API to use

api.AddHeader( header, value )

Used to add a default API header

PARAMETER	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
header	string	The default header to be added
value	string	The value to set the header to

api.SetHeader( header, value )

Used to modify a default API header

PARAMETER	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
header	string	The default header to be modified
value	string	The value to set the header to

api.RemoveHeader( header )

Used to remove a default API header

PARAMETER	TYPE	DESCRIPTION
header	string	The default header to be removed