Related modules for Foxx

These are some of the modules outside of Foxx you will find useful when writing Foxx services.

Additionally there are modules providing some level of compatibility with Node.js as well as a number of bundled NPM modules (like lodash and joi). For more information on these modules, see the JavaScript API.

The @arangodb module

require('@arangodb')

This module provides access to various ArangoDB internals as well as three of the most important exports necessary to work with the database in Foxx: db, aql and errors.

You can find a full description of this module in the ArangoDB module appendix.

The @arangodb/locals module

require('@arangodb/locals')

This module provides a context object which is identical to the service context of whichever module requires it.

There is no advantage to using this module over the module.context variable directly unless you’re using a tool like Webpack to translate your code and can’t use the module object Foxx provides directly.

The @arangodb/request module

require('@arangodb/request')

This module provides a function for making HTTP requests to external services. Note that while this allows communicating with third-party services it may affect database performance by blocking Foxx requests as ArangoDB waits for the remote service to respond. If you routinely make requests to slow external services and are not directly interested in the response it is probably a better idea to delegate the actual request/response cycle to a gateway service running outside ArangoDB.

You can find a full description of this module in the request module appendix.

The @arangodb/general-graph module

require('@arangodb/general-graph')

This module provides access to ArangoDB graph definitions and various low-level graph operations in JavaScript. For more complex queries it is probably better to use AQL but this module can be useful in your setup and teardown scripts to create and destroy graph definitions.

For more information see the chapter on the general graph module.