Pupparazzi

Learning objectives

1. Learn Express router
2. Practise writing asynchronous code using promises
3. Practise server side rendering

Getting started

• After cloning this repo, install the dependencies with npm install
• To debug the server and have it reload with Nodemon after changes: npm run dev

Gotchas

1. The order of routes is important. The first one that matches will be used. So if you have a /:id route before an /edit route, a request to /edit will choose the /:id route and the value of req.params.id will be "edit".
2. There can only be one server response (e.g. res.send() or res.render()) per request. If you have multiple potential responses (like a success and an error response) make sure to write your logic so that the route responds appropriately.
3. Make sure to JSON.parse and JSON.stringify when reading/writing JSON data.
4. Don't forget to catch errors when working with promises, using catch blocks.

Let's see some puppies!

First up, let's get our server running with a default route

1. In the server.js, add an HTTP GET root route (/). For now, let's just send the word 'Pupparazzi'
2. Start the server and go to http://localhost:3000 to see if we are winning

Now that we have a root route, let's use it to see some puppies.

User Story 1: As a user, I want to see some puppies, so that, you know, I can say awwww

• In our server file, change the GET / route function. We will use this route to:

  1. read the puppies from our data.json file using fsPromises.readFile (don't forget to parse the data into a JavaScript object)
  2. render the puppies using the home view (that has already been created) and your puppies data

If your page renders, but there are no puppies:

• check what data the view is expecting to receive
• console.log the view data object you are passing to the render and make sure this matches what the view is expecting

Getting our routes on

You should now have the puppies rendering on the / page. If you click on the picture however, the link it takes you to is broken (because we haven't written it yet). Let's fix that now.

User Story 2: As a user, I want to click on a puppy and see their name, breed, and who their owner is

1. Take note of the url you are sent to (perhaps /puppies/1).
2. Create a routes.js file in the main repo directory - this will store all of our routes.
3. require Express in your routes.js file and create a router. Also, don't forget to export the router.
4. require and use our newly created routes.js file in our server. We'll use the string /puppies to define the prefix path for our router. Note that the use line of code should come after your server configuration and handlebars configuration.
5. Create a GET route in your routes.js to render a particular puppy. The route should contain the id as a parameter so you can access it via req.params.id (so perhaps /:id)
6. Similarly to the / route in server.js, it should read the puppies from our JSON file, but this time, we will need to use the id to find only the selected puppy from the puppies array.
7. Render the puppy. As before the details view has already been created for you.

User Story 3: As a user, I want to be able to update the puppy's name, breed and owner

For this, we are going to need GET a form to edit/update the puppy information. This form also needs to POST the updated information from the form to the server. Hence, we are going to need two routes this time (don't panic!)

For the GET /puppies/:id/edit route:

1. Loop through our JSON file and find the puppy that we want to edit (don't forget that id as a parameter)
2. Render the form using the edit view and the puppy data that we want to edit

For the POST /puppies/:id/edit route:

1. Create an object of the updated puppy data from the request body
2. Read in the JSON file and locate the puppy we are going to update
3. Update the puppy in the array
4. Write the entire array back into the JSON file
5. Redirect to the GET /puppies/:id route

If all goes well, you should be able to update the puppy information. If that isn't happening, undoing the changes you've made to the JSON file might come in handy.

Stretch

If you've reached this point, congratulations! As a stretch, you might like to do the following:

1. Write some tests using jest and supertest (don't forget to npm install these).
2. Add a new view and route that includes a form which lets the user add a new puppy.