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Is there a way to send acknowledgement response in AWS Lambda functions

I am trying to handle a modal submission in slack, but there are some database operations in between which are taking a few seconds of time, due to this delay, I am getting: We had some trouble connecting error when submitting slack dialog (Slack API)
I know in node.js we can do something like this:
app.post('/', async (req, res){
res.status(200).send({text: 'Acknowledgement received !'});
// handle other task
return res.json({done: 'Yipee !'})
})
But in AWS Lambda function, I have no idea how will I handle this acknowledgement response in 3 sec.
module.exports.events = async (event, context, callback) => {
??? -> How to handle acknowledgement here, it must be handled at top.
// handle task
return {
statusCode: 200,
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json'
},
body: JSON.stringify({text: 'Done !'})
}
}

If all you want to do is to get notified for a successfull invocation and then have the lambda keep doing its own thing you can invoke lambda asynchronously by setting the InvocationType parameter to Event. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/API_Invoke.html#API_Invoke_RequestSyntax

Slack's API can be difficult to handle with a serverless architecture, as most serverless implementations like the response to be the last thing they do, rather than the first. One approach would be to wrap any required behaviour inside a promise, and only resolve that promise once you have handled the task. See here for an example of this.

Unit test for a sub-method which called from main method and include http-request authoraztion

I faced to a really complicated scenario, hope you guys give me a hint.
So I have a main method, which is a api endpoint, this method call another method to check if the user is authorized to use this endpoint or not.
The sub-endpoint which I called it apiAuthorazation send a get request to a thirdparty url, and this third-party return a response which says this user is authorized, or not!
So I already have a unit test for the main method, but now I want add this authorization part to it. I know I can use muck libs like Nock or other similar libraries, but my problem is how can I add this sub-method to my uit test.
This is my api endpoint method :
module.exports.api = (event, context, callback) => {
// Authorization
let getBearertoken = event.headers.Authorization.replace("Bearer ", '');
let isAuhtorized = utilities.apiAuthorazation(getBearertoken);
//Some other Codes
}
As you can see I passed a bearer token to my sub-method, and apiAuthorazation method will going to send this token to a third-party api, and the method is like this :
module.exports.apiAuthorazation = function (token){
let url = process.env.authApiUrl
requestLib(`${url}/${token}`, function (error, response, body) {
if (error) console.log('Error while checking token :', error);
if(response.isValidUser){
return true;
}
else{
return false;
}
});
}
Now my question is how can I include this sub-method to my main method unit test. I use mocha and chai for unit testing, bceause the berear token will expire soon, so when I run the test, I send a sample event which have the berear token in it, but it's already expired, so its kind of useless.

When you unit test Api, you can mock apiAuthorization for the two scenarios (true or false) and test if Api behaves as expected. Dont worry about what happens inside the sub method at all for the Api tests as you are testing Api here and the focus is not on what is happening inside the sub method, apiAuthorization.

Node.js - Serving error 500 pages on unexpected errors

I'm trying to serve 500 pages (some generic HTML that says "500 - internal server error") from my Node.js server to requests that failed to resolve due to developer bugs, but can't find an elegant way to do this.
Lets say we have the following index.js, where a developer innocently made a mistake:
const http = require('http');
const port = 12345;
http.createServer(onHttpRequest).listen(port);
function onHttpRequest(req, res) {
var a = null;
var b = a.c; // this is the mistake
res.end('status: 200');
}
Trying to access property "c" of null throws an error, so "res.end" will never be reached. As a result, the requesting client will eventually get a timeout. Ideally, I my server to have code that can catch errors like this, and return 500 pages to the requesting client (as well as email an administrator and so on).
Using "try catch" in every single block is out of the question. Most Node.js code is async, and a lot of the code relies on external libraries with questionable error handling. Even if I use try-catch everywhere, there's a chance that an error would happen in an external library that didn't have a try-catch block inside of it, in a function that happens asynchronously, and thus my server will crash and the client would never get a response.
Shortest example I can provide:
/* my server's index.js */
const http = require('http');
const poorlyTestedNpmModule = require('some-npm-module');
const port = 12345;
http.createServer(onHttpRequest).listen(port);
function onHttpRequest(req, res) {
try {
poorlyTestedNpmModule(null, onResult);
}
catch(err) {
res.end('status: 500');
}
function onResult(err, expectedResult) {
if(err) {
res.end('status: 400');
}
else {
res.end('status: 200');
}
}
}
/* some-npm-module.js */
module.exports = function poorlyTestedNpmModule(options, callback) {
setTimeout(afterSomething, 100);
function afterSomething() {
var someValue = options.key; // here's the problem
callback(null, someValue);
}
}
Here, the server crashes, due to a function call that led to code that asynchronously throws an error. This code is not code that I control or wish to modify; I want my server to be able to handle all those errors on its own.
Now, I could, for instance, just use the global uncaughtException event, i.e.:
process.on('uncaughtException', doSomething);
but then I have no access to the (req, res) arguments, making it impossible to call res.end for the correct res instance; the only way to have access to them, is to store them in a higher-scope object for each incoming request, and then prune them on successful request resolutions, then mark existing [req, res] stored pairs as "potentially errored" whenever an uncaughtException triggers, and serve 500 pages to those requests whenever the count of currently-active requests matches the count of currently-unresolved-errors (and re-test that count per thrown uncaught expection and per successful res.end call).
Doing that works, but... it's ugly as hell. It means that request objects have to be leaked to the global scope, and it also means that my router module now has a dependency on the uncaughtException global event, and if any other code overwrites that event, everything breaks, or if I ever want to handle other uncaught exceptions for whatever reason, I'll run into cross dependency hell.
The root cause of this problem is that an unexpected error can happen anywhere, but I want to specifically catch whether an unexpected error originated from a stack trace that began from an incoming http request (and not, for example, from some interval I have running in the background, because then I get an unexpected error but obviously don't want to serve a 500 page to anyone, only email an admin with an error log), and on top of needing to know whether the error originated from an http request, I need to have access to the request+response objects that node server objects provide.
Is there no better way?
[Edit] The topic of this question is role distribution in modules.
i.e., one guy is making base code for a server, lets say a "router module". Other people will add new code to the server in the future, handling branches that are routed to.
The guy that writes the base server code has to write it in a way that it will serve 500 pages if any future code is written incorrectly and throws errors. Help him accomplish his goal.
Answers of the format "make sure all future people that add code never make mistakes and always write code that won't throw uncaught errors" will not be accepted.

At first, using uncaughtException in Nodejs is not safe. If you feel that there is no other option in your application, make sure that you exit the process in the handler of 'uncaughtException' and restart the process using pm2 or forever or someother modules. Below link can provide you its reference.
Catch all uncaughtException for Node js app
Coming to the process of error handling, as mentioned, you may always miss to handle errors with callback. To avoid, these we can use an exceptional advantage of promises in nodejs.
/* my server's index.js */
const http = require('http');
const poorlyTestedNpmModule = require('some-npm-module');
const port = 12345;
http.createServer(onHttpRequest).listen(port);
function onHttpRequest(req, res) {
try {
poorlyTestedNpmModule(null)
.then(result => {
res.end('status: 200');
})
.catch(err =>{
console.log('err is', err);
res.end('status: 400');
})
}
catch(err) {
res.end('status: 500');
}
}
/* some-npm-module.js */
module.exports = function poorlyTestedNpmModule(options, callback) {
setTimeout(afterSomething, 100);
afterSomthing = new Promise((resolve, reject)=> {
var someValue = options.key; // here's the problem
resolve(someValue);
})
}
If you see that some of the npm nodemodules are not present with promise, try to write wrappers to convert callback to promise model and use them in your application.

nodejs retrieve body from inside request scope

I'm new to nodejs and javascript in general. I believe this is an issue with the scope that I'm not understanding.
Given this example:
...
...
if (url == '/'){
var request = require('request');
var body_text = "";
request('http://www.google.com', function (error, response, body) {
console.log('error:', error);
console.log('statusCode:', response && response.statusCode);
console.log('body:', body);
body_text=body;
});
console.log('This is the body:', body_text)
//I need the value of body returned from the request here..
}
//OUTPUT
This is the body: undefined
I need to be able to get the body from response back and then do some manipulation and I do not want to do all the implementation within the request function. Of course, if I move the log line into:
request( function { //here })
It works. But I need to return the body in some way outside the request. Any help would be appreciated.

You can't do that with callbacks because this will works asynchronously.
Work with callbacks is kind of normal in JS. But you can do better with Promises.
You can use the request-promise-native to do what you want with async/await.
async function requestFromClient(req, res) {
const request = require('request-promise-native');
const body_text = await request('http://www.google.com').catch((err) => {
// always use catches to log errors or you will be lost
})
if (!body_text) {
// sometimes you won't have a body and one of this case is when you get a request error
}
console.log('This is the body:', body_text)
//I need the value of body returned from the request here..
}
As you see, you always must be in a function scope to use the async/await in promises.
Recommendations:
JS the right way
ES6 Fetures
JS clean coding
More best practices...
Using promises

Node.js and https certificate error handling

To make a long story short:
I'm building node app which making a request with https (the secure version of http). Whenever I miss-configure my request options, I'm having this error:
Node.js Hostname/IP doesn't match certificate's altnames
Great... except of the fact that the entire request code is wrapped with a valid try..catch block (which works just fine.. checked that already). The code is basically something like this:
try
{
https.request(options, (response) =>
{
// no way I making it so far this that error
}).end();
}
catch(ex)
{
// for some reason.. I'm not able to get here either
}
What I intend to do is to simply handle that error within my try..catch block
After reading some posts I've learned that this behavior is mainly because the tls module is automatically process the request and therefore making this error - this is a nice piece of information but it doesn't really help me to handle the exception.
Some other suggested to use this option:
rejectUnauthorized: false // BEWARE: security hazard!
But I rather not... so.. I guess my questions are:
Handling an error with a try..catch block should work here..right?
If not - is this behavior is by-design in node?
Can I wrap the code in any other way to handle this error?
Just to be clear - I'm not using any third-party lib (so there is no one to blame)
Any kind of help will be appreciated
Thanks

You need to add an 'error' event handler on the request object returned by https.request() to handle that kind of error. For example:
var req = https.request(options, (response) => {
// ...
});
req.on('error', (err) => {
console.log('request error', err);
});
req.end();
See this section in the node.js documentation about errors for more information.