How to integrate batch requests in a Rails API?

Question

I'm building an API with Rails 4 and I really want to create a Batch request method to not overload my app when doing a bunch of ajax requests.

The Railscasts shows how to do it in a simple way but there's a lot of stuff missing.

I also tried the batch_api gem but I wasn't successful integrating it with my application.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Apparently the batch_api gem doesn't work with rails 4 yet, but there is a fork that was started to update it to rails 4 and ruby 2.0.

https://github.com/easyPEP/batch_api/tree/feature_ruby_2

Answer 2

I know it's being late to answer this question but I recently used batch_api gem with my Rails API (rails 5.0.0 and Ruby 2.0) and it works find with me.

What you need to do is follow the instruction of this document: https://github.com/arsduo/batch_api

Shortly:

1- You need to add the batch_api gem to your application GemFile.

2- You need to add the required middleware configuration in you application.rb file:

config.middleware.use BatchApi::RackMiddleware do |batch_config|
  # you can set various configuration options:
  batch_config.verb = :put # default :post
  batch_config.endpoint = "/batchapi" # default /batch
  batch_config.limit = 100 # how many operations max per request, default 50

  # default middleware stack run for each batch request
   batch_config.batch_middleware = Proc.new { }
  # default middleware stack run for each individual operation
  batch_config.operation_middleware = Proc.new { }
end

3- Then restart your rails server.

Make sure to insert the new middleware in the appropriate location, in my case I needed to include it before "ActionDispatch::RequestId" middleware.

config.middleware.insert_before "ActionDispatch::RequestId", BatchApi::RackMiddleware

because I wanted to include X-Request-ID header in each request in the Batch request and this ID will be returned in each response so that I could know the response for each request in the Batch (note that the responses will be executed sequentially depending on the sequence each request in the Batch).