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Application-specific tips and tricks

🚩 TODO

  • Setting up SQL.
  • .NET in-process using Edge.js.
  • node-windows: Windows services, logging, and commands using Node.js.

Setting up and working with MongoDB

  1. Install MongoDB on Windows
  2. Install the MongoDB npm package in the project root by running npm install mongodb
  3. (Optional, but helpful for IntelliSense support in Visual Studio Code) Install the type definition file for MongoDB with tsd install mongodb
  4. Load the mongodb module: var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient;
  5. Determine your MongoDB connection string URI and set it to a variable: var mongoUrl = '...';

Example: mongodb://localhost:27017/yourDatabaseName

💡 MongoDB by default listens on 27017, but to verify this open the MongoDB log file mongod.log in the log directory and navigate the line that shows the port number (i.e. [initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017)

  1. Access your MongoDB database by calling MongoClient.connect() and query the returned database
MongoClient.connect(mongoUrl, function (err, db) {
    if (!err) {
        // query the collection and return a cursor to use
        // to access the data
        //
        // note: calling find() with no parameters is the equivalent
        // of pulling all documents in the collection with no
        // predicate
        var cursor = db.collection('yourCollectionName').find();

        // loop through all of the documents returned by the
        // query
        cursor.each(function (err, element) {
            if (!err && element) {
                // do something with the document
            }
            // if error and the document are undefined then
            // we have reached the no-more-documents condition
            if (!err && !element) {
                console.log('done!');
            }
        });
    }
});

Accessing platform APIs

Sometimes you need to access plaform functionality for which no suitable module is available. For example your app may need to access the registry running on a Windows Server or Desktop. In this case there are 2 ways to proceed.

  1. Create a native module add-on by wrapping code in C binding boilerplate code using the V8 sdk and dev tools.
  2. Use ref and node-ffi modules to access C buffers and call shared library (DLL) functions from javascript.

There are plenty of examples of creating native modules, including our notes on Compiling native addon modules but less on using ref and node-ffi.

💡 Note it is good practice to ensure published modules are [written to run on all platforms](building-for-cross-platform.md#writing-cross-platform-modules-and apps), even though this can be conciderable extra work. Modules that only work on Windows or Linux are likely to unpopular so such code is best restricted to private modules or app code.