Extend with JavaScript - Sending HTTP requests - Docs

Overview

You can use the global $http.send(config) helper to send HTTP requests to external services.
This could be used for example to retrieve data from external data sources, to make custom requests to a payment provider API, etc.

Below is a list with all currently supported config options and their defaults.

// throws on timeout or network connectivity error
const res = $http.send({
    url:     "",
    method:  "GET",
    body:    "", // ex. JSON.stringify({"test": 123}) or new FormData()
    headers: {}, // ex. {"content-type": "application/json"}
    timeout: 120, // in seconds
})

console.log(res.headers)    // the response headers (ex. res.headers['X-Custom'][0])
console.log(res.cookies)    // the response cookies (ex. res.cookies.sessionId.value)
console.log(res.statusCode) // the response HTTP status code
console.log(res.body)       // the response body as plain bytes array
console.log(res.json)       // the response body as parsed json array or map 

Here is an example that will enrich a single book record with some data based on its ISBN details from openlibrary.org.

onRecordCreateRequest((e) => {
    let isbn = e.record.get("isbn");

    // try to update with the published date from the openlibrary API
    try {
        const res = $http.send({
            url: "https://openlibrary.org/isbn/" + isbn + ".json",
            headers: {"content-type": "application/json"}
        })

        if (res.statusCode == 200) {
            e.record.set("published", res.json.publish_date)
        }
    } catch (err) {
        e.app.logger().error("Failed to retrieve book data", "error", err);
    }

    return e.next()
}, "books") 

multipart/form-data requests

In order to send multipart/form-data requests (ex. uploading files) the request body must be a FormData instance.

PocketBase JSVM's FormData has the same APIs as its browser equivalent with the main difference that for file values instead of Blob it accepts $filesystem.File.

const formData = new FormData();

formData.append("title", "Hello world!")
formData.append("documents", $filesystem.fileFromBytes("doc1", "doc1.txt"))
formData.append("documents", $filesystem.fileFromBytes("doc2", "doc2.txt"))

const res = $http.send({
    url:    "https://...",
    method: "POST",
    body:   formData,
})

console.log(res.statusCode) 

Limitations

As of now there is no support for streamed responses or server-sent events (SSE). The $http.send call blocks and returns the entire response body at once.

For this and other more advanced use cases you'll have to extend PocketBase with Go.