Intercepting 401 for any response in Elm - elm

Question

I'm building an application in Elm where most API calls are protected; i.e. the user needs to be logged in for the API call to work. If the user is not logged in, they will receive a 401 Unauthorized response. I want the application to redirect to the login page if any response is a 401.
Currently, I only have this redirect set up for a single API call. Here is a stripped-down version of the code to give an idea of how it's set up:
-- Util/Api.elm
type alias Data data =
{ data : data
}
-- Resources/Expense.elm
getExpenses : (Progress (Api.Data (List Expense)) -> msg) -> Sub msg
getExpenses msg =
(dataDecoder expenseListDecoder)
|> Http.get expensesEndpoint
|> Progress.track expensesEndpoint msg
-- Main/Msg.elm
type Msg
= ExpenseListMsg ExpenseListMsg
| RedirectToLogin
-- Main/Update.elm
update : Msg -> Model -> ( Model, Cmd Msg )
update msg model =
case msg of
ExpenseListMsg msg ->
ExpenseList.Update.update msg model
GoTo path ->
model ! [ Navigation.newUrl path ]
RedirectToLogin ->
model ! [ Navigation.load "path/to/login" ]
-- ExpenseList/Msg.elm
type ExpenseListMsg
= GetExpensesProgress (Progress (Api.Data (List Expense)))
| SetLoading
-- ExpenseList/Update.elm
update : ExpenseListMsg -> Model -> ( Model, Cmd Msg )
update msg model =
case msg of
SetLoading ->
{ model | expenses = setExpensesLoading model.expenses } ! []
GetExpensesProgress (Done { data }) ->
{ model | expenses = addExpenses model.expenses data } ! []
GetExpensesProgress (Fail (BadStatus { status })) ->
case status.code of
401 ->
model ! [ msgToCmd RedirectToLogin ]
_ ->
model ! []
GetExpensesProgress (Fail error) ->
model ! []
GetExpensesProgress progress ->
{ model | expenses = setExpensesLoading model.expenses } ! []
Essentially, I want to move the logic around 401 responses from ExpenseList/Update.elm up to Main/Update.elm so that I can use it for any request I want.
I attempted a number of things, but nothing quite worked with Elm's type system. For example, one thing I wanted to do was try to do a nested pattern match with missing specificity in the middle, e.g.:
-- Main/Update.elm
update : Msg -> Model -> ( Model, Cmd Msg )
update msg model =
case msg of
ApiCall (messageType (msg (Fail (BadStatus { status })))) ->
case status of ->
. . .
. . .
I was hoping something like this would work and would match a message that looked like: ApiCall (ExpenseListMsg (GetExpensesProgress (Fail (BadStatus)))). Unfortunately, it's not proper Elm syntax, so my code didn't compile.
How can I write something that will allow me to mark an API call as protected and catch 401 errors at the top level in Main.Update.update?

Answer 1

Currently, the API call is encapsulated by the ExpenseList/Update module. This encapsulation is what makes the API call results unavailable to the Main module. The interaction works like this: Main -> FeatureModule -> API
Because the API is what provides the information needed to determine whether the app should redirect to the login page, and you want the Main module to perform the redirect, the Main module needs access to the API. Hence, the encapsulation needs to go. Instead, you can:
Have an API module which provides the low-level API functionality by producing Tasks. Unlike producing Cmds, this allows the caller, such as the Main module to decide how to handle the result of the Task, which can be acquired by converting the Task to a Cmd and giving it to the Elm runtime for execution.
Have the ExpenseList.Update module use the API module to create Tasks.
With this arrangement:
The Main module sends high-level commands to a feature module, which then uses the API module to produce the low-level instructions, which are then provided to the Main module.
The Main module doesn't need to care what those low-level instructions are, it simply converts the Task to a Cmd and waits for the result.
When the result comes back it's in a low-level format (ex. Success/Fail). At this point the Main module can jump in and handle the redirect on a 401 error. Otherwise, it can pass the result to a feature module so it may handle the result.