MEAN Questions (and Answers)

Today we'll be getting our first taste of the MEAN stack: Mongoose, Express, Angular, Node. We've done server side Mongo/Express/Node and client side Angular. It's time to put the piece together.

Server Routes

Our routes live in ./api.js.

Our application has CRUD routes for Questions:

Method	Action	Verb
GET	/api/questions	index
POST	/api/questions	create
GET	/api/questions/:id	show
PUT	/api/questions/:id	update
DELETE	/api/questions/:id	destroy

And some nested routes for Answers:

Method	Action	Verb
POST	/api/questions/:questionId/answers	create
PUT	/api/questions/:questionId/answers/:id	update
DELETE	/api/questions/:questionId/answers/:id	destroy

We also have routes for Authentication (but resources aren't protected yet):

Method	Action	Verb
POST	/api/users/login	sessions#create
PUT	/api/users/logout	sessions#destory
UPDATE	/api/users/register	user#create

Take a moment to explore the following files:

• server.js
• api.js
• /controllers/questions_controller.js

Setup

Clone this repo.

npm install
# installs node modules
# (!) installs bower components in the /public/vendor directory

mongod # run the database server (do this in a seperate tab!)
node seed.js # adds a few questions to the databse

nodemon # run the server
open http://localhost:3000 # launch the application in the browser

Postman Challenge

To explore todays application we're going to user a browser extension called Postman.

Please install the postman browser extension for chrome: https://www.getpostman.com/

Instructions for using Postman can be found here: https://www.getpostman.com/docs/requests

Challenge: Can you verify that ALL of the endpoints are working, using curl and/or Postman? Can you create and modify questions and answers?

Sidenote: Using CURL to explore API endpoints

GET questions#index:

curl http://localhost:3000/api/questions
# or
curl -X GET http://localhost:3000/api/questions

POST questions#create

curl -X POST --data "text=I love curling" http://localhost:3000/api/questions

PUT and DELETE follow the same pattern!

Angular Challenge

Your challenge is to setup views for Questions and Answers.

• / should display a list of questions
• /questions/:id should display a single question + answers
• /questions/:id/edit should allow you to update/delete a question

Stretch Goal: A user can answer questions.

Authorization Challenge

Take a look at the requireUser function in /controllers/users_controller.js.

How would you use this "middleware" to protect all the API endpoints from a user who isn't logged in? (You don't need to protect GET requests, but definitely POST/PUT/DELETE!)