Chained Throwing Futures in SwiftNIO & Vapor - swift

Question

In Vapor 4, I'm processing a post request by calling a request on a 3rd party API and returning a value based on the result I get back. The following code results in the error: "Invalid conversion from throwing function ... to non-throwing function"
app.post("activate") { req -> EventLoopFuture<ActivationRequestResponse> in
return req.client.post("https://api.example.com/activation", headers: HTTPHeaders(), beforeSend: { (req) in
try req.content.encode(RequestBody(value: someValue), as: .json)
})
.map { (response) -> ActivationRequestResponse in
let response = try response.content.decode(ResponseModel.self)
return ActivationRequestResponse(success: true, message: "success")
}
}
I can't seem to use try in my chained map() after getting the API result. The above code will work if I add a ! to the try in let response = try response.content.decode(ResponseModel.self) inside the map, but ideally I want to catch this error. The first try used when creating the response body seems to be implicitly passed back up the chain, but not the second.
What am I doing wrong? How do I catch the error when decoding the response content? Why is the first try caught but not the second?

Answer 1

The property of map is that it will just transform a value on the “success path”. Your transformation may however fail which means that you presumably want the future to fail too.
Whenever you want to transform a value with a function that either succeeds or fails you need to use one of the flatMap* functions.
In your case, try replacing map with flatMapThrowing and then it should work.

Answer 2

To expand on Johannes Weiss' answer, to have a throwing closure that returns a future, you need something like:
future.flatMap {
do {
return try liveDangerously()
} catch {
future.eventLoop.makeFailedFuture(error)
}
}
After doing this too many times, I decided to roll my own (though the name is a bit dubious):
extension EventLoopFuture {
#inlinable
public func flatterMapThrowing<NewValue>(file: StaticString = #file,
line: UInt = #line,
_ callback: #escaping (Value) throws -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue>) -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue> {
return self.flatMap(file: file, line: line) { (value: Value) -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue> in
do {
return try callback(value)
} catch {
return self.eventLoop.makeFailedFuture(error)
}
}
}
}
That way you can just write:
future.flatterMapThrowing {
return try liveDangerously()
}