README.md

Heard

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Background

Heard is an application that aims to foster a safe, anonymous community of secret sharers and secret bearers. Users can choose to share a confession or start a message thread about a specific topic. The application design takes a mobile-focused approach as most of the interactions will likely take place sporadically throughout the day on an accessible device.

Technologies Utilized

• MongoDB
• Javascript
• React/Redux
• Express.js
• Node.js

Features

User Authentication - Login/Signup

Heard features a fully functional user authentication system, complete with a demo user login and error handling for incomplete entries. Upon successful login, the user will be redirected to a home page where the user can choose to participate in the application as a listener or create confessions or message threads.

Message Thread Feature

Users can create topics that open message threads, or proceed directly to an index of topics. From a side menu, they can edit and/or delete the threads that they created.

Within a chat, users are anonymized. New messages are fetched at regular short intervals from the server.

Topics are organized in the database so that they are affiliated with a user and an array of messages in Mongoose:

const TopicSchema = mongoose.Schema(
  {
    user: {
      type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId,
      required: true,
      ref: "User",
    },
    ...
    messages: [
      {
        type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId,
        ref: "Message",
      },
    ],
    ...

In order to create messages then, the frontend must send in not only the content of the new message, but the topicId of the topic the message is affiliated with. Authentication middleware grabs the userId from the JSON Web Token (JWT).

const createMessage = asyncHandler(async (req, res) => {

  const { topicId, content } = req.body;
  
  const userId = req.user._id
  
  if (!topicId|| !content || !userId) {
    res.status(400);
    throw new Error("Data missing. need topic ID, content, and user ID");
  }
  const messageInfo ={
   sender: userId,
    content,
    topicId
  };
  try {
    const newMessage = await Message.create(messageInfo)
    
    const fullMessage = await Message.findOne({_id : newMessage._id})
    .populate('topicId')

    const foundTopic = await Topic.findById(topicId)
    if (foundTopic){
      Topic.findByIdAndUpdate(topicId, {
        messages: [...foundTopic.messages, fullMessage._id]
      })
    res.status(200).json(fullMessage)
    }
  }catch(error) {
    res.status(401).json({message: 'problem in messages controller', error: error})
  }
});

It is then populated with its topicId before the topic is found and updated by appending the message to its list of messages using findByIdAndUpdate().

Updating the title's title and / or mood or deleting it is simpler, involving mainly the findById and findByIdAndUpdate methods, since a new instance of a Message object does not have to be created.

Confessions - Creation and Display

On Heard, users can anonymously share their deepest secrets with our confessions tab, where they're sent to our MongoDatabase and stored until randomly selected to be seen by another user. Once seen confessions are then deleted, never to be seen again. If a user ever regrets a confession, they can be deleted on their profile where only they can see it.

    useEffect(() => {
        dispatch(fetchConfessions())
        setTimeout(function () {
            setIsLoading(false);
        }, 3000)
        setTimeout(function () {
            setShowConfession(false);
            history.push(`/confession-next`)
        }, 13000)
    },[]);
    let posts = confessions[0];
    let total = posts.length;
    let random = Math.floor(Math.random()*total);
    let randomConfession = posts[random];
    

Edit controller

This controller was designed to allow only the user of the post or an admin to edit the title, mood, etc. However, ANY user can edit the flagged field of any document. This was fun to think about and adds a great safety feature for the admin users who can see all posts and comments and delete or un-flag them upon review. It also provides safety for the user knowing no-one can edit confessions by them or edit their topic threads.

Similar safety features are in place for all requests that involve editing or deleting a user's content. The team felt that an admin user feature were important when creating an Anonymous platform so as to be able to hold those who chose to share irresponsibly accountable. Fun fun to code :)

BackEnd safety summary

• protection for user from others editing their content
• ablility to flag other's content when innapropriate
• admin abilities to edit and delete any user's content

Team Members

• [Anna Luz Fisher] (https://github.com/annaluzfisher)
• [Dan Kam] (https://github.com/danronkam)
• [Karen Siu] (https://github.com/k3tang)
• [Vincent Shuali] (https://github.com/canjalal)