Unexplained middleware causes confusion with JSON objects on HTTP requests

[LoganSimonsen]

Current State

Node Library has middleware that causes objects with an id to be stripped of any keys/values that are not id when making HTTP requests (or responding on an HTTP request).

Desired State

• [] As a developer, I want clarity on what information is being sent to EasyPost or to my other applications from my Node server (which has easypost-node middleware). I want my objects basically sent "as-is" with minimal modifications from middleware.

Impact

When sending data from my Node server to a front-end client, as an example, I've found that objects are being sent without all of the information that I may want to have access to on the front end. This is confusing because it is not easy for me to tell why this is happening.

---

Examples
I make a request to EasyPost to create a shipment and receive a response back with the full shipment object, including nested objects like from_address, to_address, parcel etc. These object include multiple keys such as name, company, street1 etc as well as a unique identifier created by easypost, such as adr_123456

When take that entire shipment object and send it to my front-end application, something weird happens

//from my node server, where response.data is the full response.data from EasyPost
res.send(response.data)

my front-end application logs the response from my server like so:

{
  "id": "shp_123456",
  "object": "Shipment",
  "reference": "testing",
  "mode": "test",
  "created_at": "2022-03-09T20:53:14Z",
  "updated_at": "2022-03-09T20:53:14Z",
  "to_address": {
    "id": "123456"
  },
  "from_address": {
    "id": "123456"
  },
  "return_address": {
    "id": "123456"
  },
  "buyer_address": {
    "id": "123456"
  },
  "parcel": {
    "id": "123456"
  },
  "carrier_accounts": [
    "ca_123456"
  ],
  "forms": [],
  "rates": [
    {
      "id": "rate_123456",
      "object": "Rate",
      "created_at": "2022-03-09T20:53:14Z",
      "updated_at": "2022-03-09T20:53:14Z",
      "mode": "test",
      "service": "Priority",
      "carrier": "USPS",
      "rate": "8.56",
      "currency": "USD",
      "retail_rate": "11.65",
      "retail_currency": "USD",
      "list_rate": "8.56",
      "list_currency": "USD",
      "delivery_days": 1,
      "delivery_date": null,
      "delivery_date_guaranteed": false,
      "est_delivery_days": 1,
      "shipment_id": "shp_123456",
      "carrier_account_id": "ca_123456"
    },

I'm expecting my objects to contain more information, such as:

 "from_address": {
    "id": "123456",
    "name":"Guy Man",
    "company":"Man and Guy Industries",
    "street1":"123 fake street",
.....

Note how it doesn't do anything with rates[0] because rates is an array and not an object.

Steps to Reproduce the Issue
when using EasyPost node middleware, send an HTTP request/response with objects that contain an id as well as other key/value pairs. Then observe how they are received on the other end of the request.

Code
I believe the offending code is in this base.js file at https://github.com/EasyPost/easypost-node/blob/master/src/resources/base.js#L281

[Justintime50]

After some additional testing I found why it's setup this way. If you want to create a shipment but only pass it the address and parcel IDs, this logic will do that for you; however, it's probably poorly written and has the unintended side effect of only returning those IDs on the response as well so instead of removing this, we should refactor it to work correctly.

I'm going to make some tests across all our libs to establish a baseline behavior for this and then can determine what best course of action to take on this item. We'll make sure we get it into this upcoming major release though.

[Justintime50]

Can't reproduce, closing.