Trouble integrating a third-party payment API with Node.js - unexpected data format handling
After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I'm converting an old project and While working on a project where we need to integrate a third-party payment API into our existing Node.js application, I've hit a wall with unexpected data formats from the response. We're using Express.js on the backend and Axios for HTTP requests. The API documentation specifies that responses should be in JSON, but we're frequently receiving responses that have more complex nested structures than outlined. Here's a snippet of the code I'm using to make the request: ```javascript const axios = require('axios'); async function processPayment(paymentData) { try { const response = await axios.post('https://api.payment.com/v1/process', paymentData); console.log('Payment Response:', response.data); handleResponse(response.data); } catch (error) { console.error('Payment Error:', error.response.data); } } ``` The response sometimes has fields that are not documented, like `extra_info` or the main `transaction` object can vary significantly based on the payment type. We started implementing a response handler function to manage different structures, but it feels fragile and hard to maintain. Here's a portion of that handler: ```javascript function handleResponse(data) { if (data.error) { console.error('API Error:', data.error); return; } // Attempt to normalize the response toTransactionResponse(data); } function toTransactionResponse(data) { const response = {}; response.id = data.transaction.id ? data.transaction.id : 'unknown'; response.status = data.transaction.status ? data.transaction.status : 'unknown'; // Handling extra_info if exists if (data.extra_info) { response.extraDetails = data.extra_info.details || {}; } return response; } ``` We've also tried using Joi for data validation, but that doesn't address the issue of handling unexpected fields effectively. The goal is to have a robust solution that can handle these variations without adding excessive complexity to our codebase. How can we create a more resilient structure for processing this data? Are there best practices for dynamically handling unexpected fields in a Node.js application that can help us streamline this integration? Any insights on this would be greatly appreciated! This is my first time working with Javascript 3.9. Thanks for any help you can provide! This is part of a larger REST API I'm building. Any ideas how to fix this?