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IBM Cloud Object Storage Connectivity Solutions

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Query IBM Cloud Object Storage Data from Node.js


The API Server exposes Web services that allow connectivity to your data. Use the OData endpoint of the CData API Server to execute CRUD queries to IBM Cloud Object Storage data from Node.js.

The CData API Server, when paired with the ADO.NET Provider for IBM Cloud Object Storage, exposes IBM Cloud Object Storage data (or data from any of 200+ other ADO.NET Providers) as an OData endpoint, which can be queried from Node.js using simple HTTP requests. This article shows how to use the API Server to request JSON-formatted IBM Cloud Object Storage data in Node.js.

Set Up the API Server

Follow the steps below to begin producing secure IBM Cloud Object Storage OData services:

Deploy

The API Server runs on your own server. On Windows, you can deploy using the stand-alone server or IIS. On a Java servlet container, drop in the API Server WAR file. See the help documentation for more information and how-tos.

The API Server is also easy to deploy on Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, and Heroku.

Connect to IBM Cloud Object Storage

After you deploy the API Server and the ADO.NET Provider for IBM Cloud Object Storage, provide authentication values and other connection properties needed to connect to IBM Cloud Object Storage by clicking Settings -> Connections and adding a new connection in the API Server administration console.

Register a New Instance of Cloud Object Storage

If you do not already have Cloud Object Storage in your IBM Cloud account, follow the procedure below to install an instance of SQL Query in your account:

  1. Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
  2. Navigate to the page, choose a name for your instance and click Create. You will be redirected to the instance of Cloud Object Storage you just created.

Connecting using OAuth Authentication

There are certain connection properties you need to set before you can connect. You can obtain these as follows:

API Key

To connect with IBM Cloud Object Storage, you need an API Key. You can obtain this as follows:

  1. Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
  2. Navigate to the Platform API Keys page.
  3. On the middle-right corner click "Create an IBM Cloud API Key" to create a new API Key.
  4. In the pop-up window, specify the API Key name and click "Create". Note the API Key as you can never access it again from the dashboard.

Cloud Object Storage CRN

If you have multiple accounts, you will need to specify the CloudObjectStorageCRN explicitly. To find the appropriate value, you can:

  • Query the Services view. This will list your IBM Cloud Object Storage instances along with the CRN for each.
  • Locate the CRN directly in IBM Cloud. To do so, navigate to your IBM Cloud Dashboard. In the Resource List, Under Storage, select your Cloud Object Storage resource to get its CRN.

Connecting to Data

You can now set the following to connect to data:

  • InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to avoid repeating the OAuth exchange and manually setting the OAuthAccessToken.
  • ApiKey: Set this to your API key which was noted during setup.
  • CloudObjectStorageCRN (Optional): Set this to the cloud object storage CRN you want to work with. While the connector attempts to retrieve this automatically, specifying this explicitly is recommended if you have more than Cloud Object Storage account.

When you connect, the connector completes the OAuth process.

  1. Extracts the access token and authenticates requests.
  2. Saves OAuth values in OAuthSettingsLocation to be persisted across connections.

You can then choose the IBM Cloud Object Storage entities you want to allow the API Server access to by clicking Settings -> Resources.

Authorize API Server Users

After determining the OData services you want to produce, authorize users by clicking Settings -> Users. The API Server uses authtoken-based authentication and supports the major authentication schemes. Access can also be restricted based on IP address; all IP addresses except the local machine are restricted by default. You can authenticate as well as encrypt connections with SSL.

Consume IBM Cloud Object Storage OData Feeds from Node.js

OData feeds are easy to work with in Node.js. You can use the HTTP client in Node.js to request JSON-formatted data from the API Server's OData endpoint. After making the request, you can construct the body of the response and call the JSON.parse() function to parse it into records.

The code below will make an authenticated request for Objects data. The example URL below applies a simple filter that searches for records with a value of someBucket in the Bucket column.

var http = require('http'); http.get({ protocol: "http:", hostname: "MyServer.com", port: MyPort, path: "/api.rsc/Objects?$filter=" + encodeURIComponent("Bucket eq 'someBucket'"), auth: 'MyUser:MyAuthtoken' }, function(res) { var body = ''; res.on('data', function(chunk) { body += chunk; }); res.on('end', function() { console.log(body); var jsonData = JSON.parse(body); }); }).on('error', function(e) { console.log("Error: ", e); });