Meteor http calls limitations - http

Question

Currently, I use the built-in meteor http method (see http://docs.meteor.com/#http) for issuing http calls, on both my client and my server.
However, I'm experiencing two issues:
is it possible to cancel a request?
is it possible to have multiple query parameters which share the same key?
Are these just Meteor limitations, or are there ways to get both to work using Meteor?
I know I could you jquery on the clientside, and there must be a server-side solution which supports both as wel, but I'd prefer sticking with meteor code here.

Answer 1

"is it possible to cancel a request?"
HTTP.call() does not appear to return an object on which we could call something like a stop() method. Perhaps a solution would be to prevent execution of your callback based on a Session variable?
HTTP.call("GET", url, function(error, result) {
if (!Session.get("stopHTTP")) {
// Callback code here
}
});
Then when you reach a point where you want to cancel the request, do this:
Session.set("stopHTTP", true);
On the server, instead of Session perhaps you could use an environment variable?
Note that the HTTP.call() options object does accept a timeout key, so if you're just worried about the request never timing out, you can set this to whatever millisecond integer you want.
"is it possible to have multiple query parameters which share the same key?"
Yes, this appears to be possible. Here's a simple test I used:
Meteor code:
HTTP.call("GET", "http://localhost:1337", {
query: "id=foo&id=bar"
}, function(error, result) {
// ...
});
Separate Node.js server: (just the basic example on the Node.js homepage, with a console.log line to output the request URL with query string)
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
console.log(req.url); // Here I log the request URL, with the query string
res.writeHead(200, {
'Content-Type': 'text/plain'
});
res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/');
When the Meteor server is run, the Node.js server logged:
/?id=foo&id=bar
Of course, this is only for GET URL query parameters. If you need to do this for POST params, perhaps you could store the separate values as a serialized array string with EJSON.stringify?