Electron development - Generate API client based on swagger definition - electron

Question

I am very new to electron, trying to use it to build a cross-platform app which should be able to run natively on the machines. On the server side, I already have an application which exposes a REST API, documented with swagger.
Now I am trying to generate a client stub for this swagger definition, which I can then use with electron. How is that accomplished? Should I just generate JS code and use it (how would that work?)? Or is there another (better) way to do it as Electron has build in functions to access REST APIs like
I spent a considerable amount if time searching for a solution and did not find one. Now I wonder if that is such an uncommon scenario to use Electron as framework accessing REST APIs, and auto-generating the code using swagger codegen.

Answer 1

The great thing is that Electron apps can be very similarly developed to normal web applications. This is possibly why you didn't find specific instructions for using Electron with the tools you are used to using.
You should be able to go ahead and use whichever tools you would normally use to generate stubs for calling REST from any web application, and the stubs should work fine when referenced within Electron (as long as they generate in Javascript or Typescript).
Have you tried using Swagger codegen, did you try use the resulting client code API, and did it give you an error? Try posting any specific errors as new questions on Stack Overflow for solutions (or edit this question to be more specific).
Electron is almost like a blank canvas - there is no "right" or "wrong" way to develop, although there are certainly "good practises" and "bad practises".
There are definitely concepts that are unique to developing applications within Electron and for this it would be good to couple your development experience with some general Electron reading and learning.
You will very soon run in to "unique" Electron concepts such as "main" and "renderer" and it will be much easier if you have learning material to guide you. There is a lot of material for learning Electron so I won't try make a list here.
Also note that Stack Overflow is more useful when specific errors or minimum examples are provided and you'll probably get better answers that way :-) See: https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve for more info on this.

Answer 2

I actually ended up swagger-codegen as GrahamMc suggested.
The general approach was like that:
rm -rf api
wget http://localhost/site/json-schema -O api.json
docker run --user `id -u`:`id -g` --rm -v ${PWD}:/local swaggerapi/swagger-codegen-cli generate -i /local/api.json -l javascript -o /local/api
rm api.json
cd api
npm install
Step 1 is cleaning up old generated code and step 2 is downloading the swagger spec which is not available from within the docker-container. The rest is cleaning up and installing dependencies.
From within the code, it can then be used like that:
var jtm_api = require('.api/')
var userApi = new jtm_api.UserApi()
var cb = function(error, data, response) {
if (response.status == 200) {
//do whatever
} else {
//do whatever
}
}
userApi.usersLoginPost(txtUser, txtPwd, cb)
There is an extensive documentation available on how to use the generated code starting from the README.md file within the generated folder.