annahasselstrom / project-happy-thoughts-api

In this project I use Express and Mongodb to build an API that includes both GET request endpoints to return data and POST endpoints to create data. ❤️

Project Happy Thoughts API ❤️

In this project I use Express and Mongodb to build an API that includes both GET request endpoints to return data and POST endpoints to create data.

View it live 👀

https://project-happy-thoughts-anna.herokuapp.com/

https://inspiring-lalande-9954d9.netlify.app/

Learnings 🤓

• How to use POST requests to send data to your API
• How to store data in your database from POST requests
• How to validate data and ensure your database only contains 'good' data

Making it work 👍

In my earlier project - Happy Thoughts - I built a frontend in React which uses an API I created to store messages. In this new project, I have built my own API which works in the same way and I used that one to replace the API I used before in the React frontend.

In the first project I built a frontend that has a form to write a new 'happy thought', lists recent thoughts/messages, and shows a count of 'hearts' on each message. Users could then click the heart to like a message.

In order to replace the API I built, I build a 'Message' Mongoose model which has properties for the 'message' string, a 'heart' property for tracking the number of likes, and a 'createdAt' property to store when the message was added.

I then added 3 endpoints.

Each of the Message model's properties has special rules/validations:

• 'message' - the text of the message

  • Required
  • Min length of 5 characters
  • Max length of 140 characters

• 'hearts' - the number of heart clicks this message has received

  • Defaults to '0'
  • Should not be re-assignable

• 'createdAt' - the time the message was added to the database

  • Defaults to the current time
  • Should not be re-assignable