I was not talking about adding a new function on every request, but mostly to have a helper to deal with this pattern:

1. check that the thing has the property
2. check that the property has a specific value

That's quite some work when you just want to know if the request has a flag in my opinion. I am not a js coder, but I am surprised if node.js does not provide such helpers to manipulate json requests.  BUt maybe that's just me being spoiled by Python :)