Handle Stripe response in Express app - node.js

Question

I'm trying to write a simple Stripe integration using Express. My code creates the customer and charge and completes, appearing in my dashboard. However I'm struggling to understand how to handle the response from Stripe. The following just outputs the whole response from Stripe - what I would like is to be able to output a friendly message dependent on the content of this response:
stripe.customers.create({
card: stripeToken
})
.then(customer =>
stripe.charges.create({
amount: fee,
description: "Client Ref: " + clientref,
currency: "gbp",
customer: customer.id,
metadata: {
'allocation:': allocate
}
}))
.then(charge => response.send(charge))
.catch(err => {
console.log("Error:", err);
response.status(500).send({error: "Purchase Failed"});
});
How can I look at the response and handle it accordingly? I've tried using the response.send promise and I can get it to display parts of the response, but is this a 'charge' page? How can I display this as html and not just plaintext??
I have looked in the Stripe docs and haven't found anything similar. I want to be able to account for failed payments, declines etc as well as successful charges.
Any help or other examples much appreciated!
Thanks
edit: ok I handle the 'errors' in the catch block. I didn't realise Stripe doesn't throw exceptions, so that makes life easier. My point about formatting the messages still stands however. '/charge' just outputs plain text.

Answer 1

How can I look at the response and handle it accordingly?
The Stripe docs clearly show you what the response for a successful charge is here: https://stripe.com/docs/api/node#create_charge (under Example response). It gives you back a large JSON object.
You need to figure out what part of that response is useful to you to display in your client-side application. If none of the information is needed, then you can simply ignore the response.
(...) but is this a 'charge' page? How can I display this as html and not just plaintext??
What you are doing now is simply sending the whole JSON object to your client via res.send. And you are not doing anything with the response other than simply sending it back as plain text. You need to configure your view to display the response: http://expressjs.com/en/guide/using-template-engines.html
Or if your producing an API for others to consume, then use res.json to send back the JSON you got back from Stripe. http://expressjs.com/en/4x/api.html#res.json
I want to be able to account for failed payments, declines etc as well as successful charges.
Then you need to handle the error that occurs. You are handling the error via .catch, but you aren't inspecting the error object. Again, the stripe have documentation on errors as well: https://stripe.com/docs/api#errors
And they even tell you how to handle errors as well: https://stripe.com/docs/api#handling-errors