How to receive json in Dancer? - perl

Question

I am very new to Perl framework Dancer. As of now I have a get http listener working. I have an Angular framework trying to post a json string to Dancer. How can I retreive the json and perhaps assign it to a scalar variable ($json).
get '/games' => sub {
header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' => '*';
&loadgames();
return $games;
};
post '/newgame' => sub {
header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' => '*';
#what should i put here to retrieve the json string
#I plan to pass the json string to a sub to convert to XML
};
I am not sure If I chose Dancer as backend framework that will get and post data.
Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

If your HTTP request has a JSON body (Content-type: application/json) rather than being an HTML form post, then you probably want something like this:
post '/url-path' => {
my $post = from_json( request->body );
# do something with the POSTed data structure
# which would typically be a hashref (or an arrayref)
# e.g.: schema->resultset('Widget')->create($post);
}
The from_json routine is one of the DSL Keywords provided by Dancer.

Answer 2

Dancer provides the params keyword for accessing route, body, and query parameters. You want a body parameter. Exactly which body parameter you want will depend on the name of the field you posted it to the route with (look at your form or your ajax request).
my $json_string = params('body')->{$field_name}
You can also use param, if you don't have any conflicting parameter names in the route or query parameters.
Once you have the json, remember it's just a string at the moment. You might want to read it into a perl data structure: Dancer provides from_json for this purpose.
As an aside: I notice in your get route, you call a function loadgames in void context, and then return a variable you haven't declared (or perhaps you have set it as a global - but do you need it to be a global?). I recommend beginning each perl file with use strict; to pick up issues like this. I suspect you probably just want to use the return value of loadgames as your return value.