# Quick Start Guide

## Introduction

Suppose you’ve developed a very useful algorithm or statistical model and you need to integrate it with some external system. Nowadays HTTP became de facto a lingua-franca for this kind of tasks.

In this article we will demonstrate how to use RestRserve to build a basic REST API.

## Workflow overview

Generally RestRserve workflow consists of several major steps:

1. Create application with `Application$new()`
2. Create a function which follows RestRserve API:
   - should take 2 arguments - `request` and `response` as an input. `request` and `response` are instances of `RestRserve::Request` and `RestRserve::Response`. It is important to remember that both `request` and `response` are mutable objects.
   - should modify `response` in place or `raise()` exception in case of error
3. Register this function as a handler for an endpoint
4. Start application

## 1. Create application

    library(RestRserve)
    app = Application$new()

## 2. Define logic

For simplicity we will use Fibonacci number calculation as an algorithm we want to expose.

    calc_fib = function(n) {
      if (n < 0L) stop("n should be >= 0")
      if (n == 0L) return(0L)
      if (n == 1L || n == 2L) return(1L)
      x = rep(1L, n)

      for (i in 3L:n) {
       x[[i]] = x[[i - 1]] + x[[i - 2]]
      }

      return(x[[n]])
    }

Create function which will handle requests.

    fib_handler = function(.req, .res) {
      n = as.integer(.req$parameters_query[["n"]])
      if (length(n) == 0L || is.na(n)) {
        raise(HTTPError$bad_request())
      }
      .res$set_body(as.character(calc_fib(n)))
      .res$set_content_type("text/plain")
    }

You may have noticed strange `.req` and `.res` argument names. Starting from `RestRserve` v0.4.0 these “reserved” names allows to benefit from autocomplete:

<img src=“https://cdn.rexy.ai/assets/req-res.gif” width=“640” style=“vertical-align:bottom”, alt=“request-response autocomplete gif”>

Technically `.req` and `.res` are just empty instances of `?Request` and `?Response` classes exported by `RestRserve` in order to make autocomplete work.

## 2. Register endpoint

    app$add_get(path = "/fib", FUN = fib_handler)

## 3. Test endpoints

Now we can test our application without starting it:

    request = Request$new(path = "/fib", parameters_query = list(n = 10))
    response = app$process_request(request)

    cat("Response status:", response$status)
    #> Response status: 200 OK
    cat("Response body:", response$body)
    #> Response body: 55

It is generally a good idea to write unit tests against application. One can use a common framework such as tinytest.

## 4. Add OpenAPI description and Swagger UI

Generally it is a good idea to provide documentation along with the API. Convenient way to do that is to supply a openapi specification. This as simple as adding a yaml file as an additional endpoint:

    openapi: 3.0.1
    info:
      title: RestRserve OpenAPI
      version: '1.0'
    servers:
      - url: /
    paths:
      /fib:
        get:
          description: Calculates Fibonacci number
          parameters:
            - name: "n"
              description: "x for Fibonnacci number"
              in: query
              schema:
                type: integer
              example: 10
              required: true
          responses:
            200:
              description: API response
              content:
                text/plain:
                  schema:
                    type: string
                    example: 5
            400:
              description: Bad Request

    yaml_file = system.file("examples", "openapi", "openapi.yaml", package = "RestRserve")
    app$add_openapi(path = "/openapi.yaml", file_path = yaml_file)
    app$add_swagger_ui(path = "/doc", path_openapi = "/openapi.yaml", use_cdn = TRUE)

## 5. Start the app

Now all is ready and we can start application with Rserve backend. It will block R session and start listening for incoming requests.

    backend = BackendRserve$new()
    backend$start(app, http_port = 8080)

## 6. Test it

Send request to calculate fibonacci number:

    curl localhost:8080/fib?n=10

Check out a swagger UI in the browser: `http://localhost:8080/doc`