quest7.md

Getting MEAN

An Introduction to API-Centered Application Development with Node.js and MongoDB

Quest 7: Creating and Reading data using the Native MongoDB Driver

With our database populated, let's head back to our routes.js and update them to perform some CRUD operations.

const express = require('express');
const router = express.Router();

const db = require('../data/db').db;
let delis = db.collection('delis');

/* ====================================== */
// Route Definitions
/* ====================================== */

// GET Routes
router.get('/', (request, response, next) => {
    console.log("You made it to the router. Nice work!");
    response.send("API index");
});

router.get('/delis', (request, response, next) => {
    console.log("You're on the quest for heros.");

    delis.find().toArray(function(err, results) {
        response.send(results);
    });
});

// POST Routes
router.post('/delis/', (request, response) => {
    delis.insertOne(request.body, (err, result) => {
        if (err) return console.log(err);
        response.send("Here's the data that was saved: " + JSON.stringify(request.body));
    });
});

// PUT routes

// DELETE routes

// Export Router for use in app.js
module.exports = router;

We can use some middleware to parse our responses. We can do that in app.js after we install it with npm

npm install --save body-parser

App.js

const bodyParser = require('body-parser');

// support for parsing application/x-www-form-urlencoded post data
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({extended: true}));

// support for parsing application/json post data
app.use(bodyParser.json());

We also need to get our database connection in our app.js.

const db = require('./api/data/db');
const data = require('./api/data/delis');

db.connect().then(function(db){
            const deliRoutes = require('./api/routes/delis');

            app.use('/', deliRoutes);

            app.use((request, response, next) => {
                response.status(200).json({
                    message: "You're becoming a hero!"
                });
            });

            // Start the web server
            app.listen(port, () => {
                console.log('Express.js server is listening on Port %s.', port);
            });

});

I'll use the Postman app for testing the API here to send a POST request with a new deli:

rest_id = 7 name = Katz's Delicatessen

Weapons, Tools and Resources

• Postman for testing APIs: Download
• body-parser middleware: [npm Site] (https://www.npmjs.com/package/body-parser)
  • Note: in Express version 4, body-parser is included in the Express package. But it was there in v2.x as well, but not in 3.x, so... yeah. You'll see it used as bodyParser.urlencoded and express.urlencoded depending on coding style.

Concepts

Helpful Hints

You are Here - Quests

	Quest	Description
	Quest Zero	First quest to read. Provides some overview information and background.
	Quest 1	Initialize your project and install some of the required software.
	Quest 2	creating a quick test JavaScript.
	Quest 3	Crafting your own tools: Building a server process using httpd and express
	Quest 4	Building Your App
	Quest 5	Defining the data for our application
	Quest 6	Enter MongoDB - Native JavaScript
>	Quest 7	Creating and Reading data using the Native MongoDB Driver
	Quest 8	Mongoose - Object Data Modeling
	Quest 9	Creating and Reading data using Mongoose

Next Quest

Next quest: Quest 8 - Mongoose - Object Data Modeling