How to send query from nodejs server to open data server?

Question

I'm working with open data: https://data.sfgov.org/Economy-and-Community/Mobile-Food-Facility-Permit/rqzj-sfat

The open data site allows to query the data, and example query is below: https://soda.demo.socrata.com/resource/4tka-6guv.json?$where=magnitude > 3.0 However, this, I imagine is URL querying. If I had to get the same object on my nodejs server, how would I format the query to receive the json objects on the node server?

Are there any security threats or exposing threats to querying for data this way?

Answer 1

Probably the easiest way to do this is via request package. You could do something like the following:

var request = require('request');

request('https://soda.demo.socrata.com/resource/4tka-6guv.json?$where=magnitude%3E3.0', function (err, res, body) {
  if (err) {
    //handle error
  } else {
    console.log(body); // and do stuff with your results
  }
});

If you run this, you'll see a print out of your result array. There aren't really any security threats with this. Your just doing a GET request from an open data source. Pretty standard stuff. Same kind of transactions happen everyday all over the web.

Answer 2

Check out the request module. Super useful

Answer 3

You can use the soda-js library.

Here is a MWE: just issue an npm install soda-js and then you can do something similar to:

const soda = require('soda-js');

const consumer = new soda.Consumer('datos.gov.co');

consumer.query()
  .withDataset('sus6-4i9j')
  .limit(5)
  .getRows()
    .on('success', function(rows) { console.log(rows); })
    .on('error', function(error) { console.error(error); });

In this example the endpoint being consumed is https://www.datos.gov.co/resource/sus6-4i9j.json, which returns a list of other APIs openly available in the www.datos.gov.co site ;).

The following is a portion of the output:

---

In your specific case, you can do

const soda = require('soda-js');

const consumer = new soda.Consumer('data.sfgov.org');

consumer.query()
  .withDataset('rqzj-sfat')
  .limit(5)
  .getRows()
    .on('success', function(rows) { console.log(rows); })
    .on('error', function(error) { console.error(error); });

Which will provide the data you need.