the-other-panicboy / express-todo-api

Buzz Word Bingo

About the game

Before a meeting the players are asked to enter words with point values. A player can enter a total of 5 words at most. Once a meeting starts if a word that the player previously entered is heard during a meeting that player can mark that word and score the points increasing their score. Each time the player scores a new word the total increases by the point value.

Welcome to Team Buzz™

Our game has been getting a lot of traction and we need to rebuild the API server with NodeJS to handle all the connections, we need you to create the server using ExpressJS. Our CTO will provide you with the specs below.

At this time:

• you will not build the front-end.
• you will not implement a database.

The Specs

We like RESTful architechure. We like CRUD. As always, data will be sent to the server as x-www-form-urlencoded.

Buzz word object

This is how your objects should look like after receiving a POST to the uri /buzzword

{
  buzzWord: String,
  score: Number
  heard: false
}

You will store these objects in memory for the time being. Meaning that if the server crashes and after restarting and listening again, your app will have no buzzWord objects, no collection containing buzzWord objects, no scores, nada.

Functionality

A global variable will keep track of a single score; this is not a multi-player game (yet). The score will be incremented and decremented using a PUT request, which looks like this: { "buzzWord": String, "heard": Bool } If heard is true and the buzzWord is in our list, the score will be incremented using the points assigned to the buzzWord. If heard is false, the score will be decremented by the point value of the buzzWord object. In either case, the heard property of an existing buzzWord object will be updated to match the incoming request and the response will include the updated score.

Routes overview table:

METHOD ROUTE (uri)	BODY	RESPONSE	Action
GET /	empty	render HTML index.html	serves the index.html
GET /buzzwords	empty	{ "buzzWords": [...] } A JSON response containing an array of current buzzWord objects	Retrieves all buzzWords
POST /buzzword	{ "buzzWord": String, "points": Number }	{ "success": true }	Creates a new buzzWord object. Returns true if successful else false. A new buzzWord object should have a default heard value of false.
PUT /buzzword	{ "buzzWord": String, "heard": Bool }	{ "success": true, newScore: Number }	Updates a buzzWord object and increments or decrements the score. Returns true and the new score if successful, otherwise returns just false
DELETE /buzzword	{ "buzzWord": String }	{ "success": true }	Delete a buzzWord object. Returns true if successful else false
POST /reset	{ "reset": true }	{ "success": true }	Resets the server. All buzzWord objects are removed and the score is reset to 0

Routes detailed

GET /: Serves the static file index.html which should be located in your public/ directory. For now just have a stub HTML file.

GET /buzzwords: Returns a JSON response containing single key, buzzWords which will be an array containing objects (see buzzWord Object Section for details)

POST /buzzword: Creates a new buzzWord object. The body should have these keys:

• buzzWord which contains the buzz word as a String and
• points property is how many points that word is worth when scored; this value is of data-type Number. Example: if { "buzzWord": "Agile is amazing", "score": 1000 } is sent to this route then the server will create a new buzzWord object and add it to a collection.

PUT /buzzword: Updates a buzzWord object's heard property. The body should contain these keys:

• buzzWord which is the buzzWord object to modify.
• heard updates the value of the buzzWord object's heard property.

Example: if { "buzzWord": "Social-Mobile", "heard": true } is sent to this route then the server will find the buzzWord object whose buzzWord property is "Social-Mobile" and change it's heard property to true. It will increase the global score by the number of points assigned to "Social-Mobile". Similarly, { "buzzWord": "Social-Mobile", "heard": false } would decrease the global score by the points property of that buzzWord object and change the object's heard property to false. In each case, the updated score would be sent as part of the response.

DELETE /buzzword: Deletes a buzzWord object from the collection.

POST /reset: Clears the list of saved buzzWord objects and zeroes out the score. Be sure to test that the request is sent to the /reset uri using the POST method, and that the request body matches the spec.

Middleware to use

Body-Parser - Use this module to help parse the data coming from a request. Focus on the urlencodedoptions section of the README, use the extended: true option. Take some time to scan through the documentation. What is body-parser module doing for us? Is this module doing something we previously had to do manually?

Getting Started

1. Create your own directory for this project, name it express-todo-api.
2. You'll be using git and npm so be sure to initialize those tools before you use them.
3. Install the packages you need
4. Use Postman to test your routes.
5. Remember to commit often!