Rendering Output

Standard serializers

Boxed vs Unboxed JSON

You may have noticed that JSON API responses generated from Plumber render singular values (or “scalars”) as arrays. For instance:

jsonlite::toJSON(list(a=5))

#> {"a":[5]}

The value of the a element, though it’s singular, is still rendered as an array. This may surprise you initially, but this is done to keep the output consistent. While JSON differentiates scalar from vector objects, R does not. This creates ambiguity when serializing an R object to JSON since it is unclear whether a particular element should be rendered as an atomic value or a JSON array.

Consider the following API which returns all the letters lexicographically “higher” than the given letter.

#* Get letters after a given letter
#* @serializer json
#* @get /boxed
#* @query letter:string("A")
function(query) {
  LETTERS[LETTERS > query$letter]
}

#* Get letters after a given letter
#* @serializer unboxedJSON
#* @get /unboxed
#* @query letter:string("A")
function(query) {
  LETTERS[LETTERS > query$letter]
}

This is an example of an API that, in some instance, produces a scalar, and in other instances produces a vector.

Visiting http://localhost:8080/boxed?letter=U or http://localhost:8080/unboxed?letter=U will return identical responses:

[
  "V",
  "W",
  "X",
  "Y",
  "Z"
]

However, http://localhost:8080/boxed?letter=Y will produce:

[
  "Z"
]

while http://localhost:8080/unboxed?letter=Y will produce:

"Z"

The /boxed endpoint, as the name implies, produces “boxed” JSON output in which length-1 vectors are still rendered as an array. Conversely, the /unboxed endpoint sets auto_unbox=TRUE in its call to jsonlite::toJSON, causing length-1 R vectors to be rendered as JSON scalars.

While R doesn’t distinguish between scalars and vectors, API clients may respond very differently when encountering a JSON array versus an atomic value. You may find that your API clients will not respond gracefully when an object that they expected to be a vector becomes a scalar in one call.

For this reason, Plumber inherits the jsonlite::toJSON default of setting auto_unbox=FALSE which will result in all length-1 vectors still being rendered as JSON arrays. You can configure an endpoint to use the unboxedJSON serializer (as shown above) if you want to alter this behavior for a particular endpoint.

There are a couple of functions to be aware of around this feature set. If using boxed JSON serialization, jsonlite::unbox() can be used to force a length-1 object in R to be presented in JSON as a scalar. If using unboxed JSON serialization, I() will cause a length-1 R object to present as a JSON array.

Graphics serializers

Graphics serializers are special because they need to do some setup and teardown around the handler in order to capture graphics output. Because of this they cannot be mixed with the standard serializers. They are omitted when using ... unless a graphics serializer has been selected explicitly in which case ... will refer to the remaining graphics serializers and omit the standard ones.

As with the standard serializers the behaviour of these can be modified by specifying additional arguments to the serializer. Many of these arguments are well-known from using graphics devices in R including width, height, and bg among others.

#* Example of customizing graphical output
#* @serializer png{width = 400, height = 500}
#* @get /
function() {
  plot(1:10)
}

Arguments inside the curly braces are evaluated in the same environment as the handler so any R expression will be valid. However, they are evaluated only once, when parsing the file, so it is not possible to provide dynamic serializer settings in this way. If you wish to dynamically size images, you will need render and capture the graphical output yourself and return the contents with the appropriate Content-Type header. See the existing image renderers as a model of how to do this.

Bypassing Serialization

In some instances it may be desirable to return a value directly from R without serialization. You can do this by settings @serializer none which will turn off any automatic serialization by plumber. Consider the following handler:

#* Endpoint that bypasses serialization
#* @get /
#* @serializer none
function(response) {
  response$body <- "Literal text here!"
}

The response that is returned from this endpoint would contain the body Literal text here! with no Content-Type header and without any additional serialization.

In a similar vein you can set a Content-Type but otherwise leave the body unchanged by providing a mime type to @serializer. You can use this annotation when you want more control over the response that you send.

#* @serializer application/pdf
#* @get /pdf
function() {
  tmp <- tempfile()
  pdf(tmp)
  plot(1:10, type="b")
  text(4, 8, "PDF from plumber!")
  text(6, 2, paste("The time is", Sys.time()))
  dev.off()

  readBin(tmp, "raw", n=file.info(tmp)$size)
}

Running this API and visiting http://localhost:8080/pdf will download the PDF generated from R (or display the PDF natively, if your client supports it).

Custom serializers

While plumber2 comes with serializers that cover most use cases you may want to provide your own. You can do so in two ways. Either by registering your serializer and refering to it by name as you would with any other native serializer, or by specifying it inline. You may want to serve toml files but plumber doesn’t (yet) ship with a serializer for this. You could quickly create your own using blogdown::write_toml(). Serializers in plumber2 are factory functions that take a range of arguments and return a unary function capable of formatting the response body:

format_toml <- function(...) {
  function(x) {
    blogdown::write_toml(x)
  }
}

You could use this directly in a handler with @serializer application/toml format_toml() or you could register it:

register_serializer("toml", format_toml, "application/toml")

and use it like any other serializer: @serializer toml

Setting Unencrypted Cookies

Plumber can both set and receive plaint-text cookies. The API endpoint below will return a random letter, but it remembers your preferences on whether you like capitalized or lower-case letters.

#* @put /preferences
#* @body capital:integer*
function(response, body) {
  response$set_cookie("capitalize", body$capital)
}

#* @get /letter
function(request) {
  capitalize <- request$cookies$capitalize

  # Default to lower-case unless user preference is capitalized
  alphabet <- letters

  # The capitalize cookie will initially be empty (NULL)
  if (!is.null(capitalize) && capitalize == "1"){
    alphabet <- LETTERS
  }

  list(
    letter = sample(alphabet, 1)
  )
}

Since this API is using a PUT request to test this API, we’ll use curl on the command line to test it. (There’s nothing about cookies that necessitates PUT requests; you could just as easily modify this API to use a GET request.) We can start by visiting the /letter endpoint and we’ll see that the API defaults to a lower-case alphabet. curl http://localhost:8080/letter

{
  "letter": [
    "k"
  ]
}

If we send a PUT request and specify the capital parameter, a cookie will be set on the client which will allow the server to accommodate our preference in future requests. In curl, you need to specify a file in which you want to save these cookies using the -c option. This is a good reminder that clients handle cookies differently – some won’t support them at all – so be sure that the clients you intend to support with your API play nicely with cookies if you want to use them.

To send a PUT request, setting the parameter capital to 1, we could invoke: curl -c cookies.txt -X PUT --data 'capital=1' "http://localhost:8800/preferences". If you print out the cookies.txt file, you should now see that it contains a single cookie called capitalize with a value of 1.

We can make another GET request to /letter to see if it accommodates our preferences. But we’ll need to tell curl to use the cookies file we just created when sending this request using the -b switch: curl -b cookies.txt http://localhost:8080/letter. You should now see that the API is returning a random capitalized letter.

The set_cookie method accepts a variety of additional options to customize how the cookie should be handled by the client. By default, cookies are set with a session lifetime, meaning that the cookie will persist in the user’s browser until the client closes the tab at which point the cookie will be deleted. You can customize this by setting the expires or max_age parameter in set_cookie using either a date or the number of seconds in the future in which this cookie should expire.

Other options that can be set on the cookie include path (the path on your domain at which the cookie should be installed on the client); http_only (controls whether or not the cookie should be accessible to JavaScript running on this domain – where TRUE means that the cookie is HTTP-only, and not accessible from JavaScript); and secure (if TRUE, instructs the browser to only send the cookie over HTTPS, not insecure HTTP.

If you’re using cookies to infer any security-sensitive properties (such as to identify a user, or determine what resources this client should have access to), be sure to see the Security article – in particular the section on the security implications of cookies.

Setting Encrypted Cookies

In addition to storing plain-text cookies, Plumber also supports handling cookies that are encrypted. Encrypted cookies prevent your users from seeing what is stored inside of them and also sign their contents so that users can’t modify what is stored.

To use this feature, you must explicitly add it to your router after constructing it. For example, you could run the following sequence of commands to create a router that supports encrypted session cookies.

api("myfile.R") %>%
  api_session_cookie("my_secret_here", "cookie_name", ...) %>%
  api_run()

Once you have used api_session_cookie(), you’ll be able to use the request$session and response$session object (they point to the same data) to read and set data that will be transmitted as an encrypted cookie named cookie_name. In this example, the key used to encrypt the data is "my_secret_here", which will not work since a 32-bit key is required for security reasons. You can construct a compliant key with reqres::random_key and store it securely using the keyring package.

Unlike response$set_header(), the values attached to the session data are serialized via jsonlite; so you’re free to use more complex data structures like lists in your session. However, the deserializing is done “blindly” using jsonlite::fromJSON() so you should always verify that type conversion has been done correctly if you are storing ambiguous values (e.g. storing "5" (the string) will get deserialized to 5 (the number) in the next request).

As an example, we’ll store an encrypted cookie that counts how many times this client has visited a particular endpoint:

#* @get /sessionCounter
function(request){
  count <- 0
  if (!is.null(request$session$counter)){
    count <- as.numeric(request$session$counter)
  }
  request$session$counter <- count + 1
  paste0("This is visit #", count)
}

Again, you would need to setup your api using the api_session_cookie() function before this code would work.

If you inspect the cookie being set in your browser, you’ll find that its value is encrypted by the time it gets to the client. But by the time it arrives in Plumber, your cookie is available as a regular R list and can be read or modified.

While session cookies are a great way to store state without setting up any additional facilities for it on your server, you should be aware that the session cookie is transmitted with each request/response and need to be encrypted and decrypted every time (the last part only happens if you try to read from it though). Using it thus adds to the server load so weigh the pros and cons of managing session state with it.