Step 4 - Adding our 'Routes', Part 1 ( 'home' & 'findAll' )

With our backend model in place, it's now time to open some routes that the frontend client can interact with. The following are a list of actions a user can perform:

  • view all donations
  • Add a new donation
  • Upvote a donation
  • Delete a donation
  • go home :-)

The actions map directly to several routes, which are described as follows:

  • GET /donations - return a list of donations and associated metadata
  • POST /donations - create a new donation
  • GET /donations/:id - return an individual donation with associated metadata
  • PUT /donations/:id/upvote - upvote a donation, notice we use the donation ID in the URL
  • DELETE /donations/:id - delete a donation by ID

Creating Our First Route - 'List All Donations'

To keep things organised we will be defining these routes in a routes/donations.js file.

Let's begin by opening up the first route we listed, which should return a JSON list containing all donations. We start by creating a function (findAll) for retrieving donations in our routes/donations.js file.

var donations = require('../models/donations');
var express = require('express');
var router = express.Router();

router.findAll = function(req, res) {
  // Return a JSON representation of our list
    res.json(donations);
}

module.exports = router;

We make sure we import express and have a handle to our donations model. By right, we should have some error handling in there, but we'll be optimistic!

Next, inside our app.js we need to define the actual route which will trigger the above function so first, add the following around line 9 or 10

var donations = require('./routes/donations');

to import our own custom module and the add this around line 26/27

app.get('/donations', donations.findAll);

to add the actual GET express route.

As we already have data in our Model, we can test it by pointing the browser at http://localhost:3000/donations and we should get back a json string of our data, like so

Creating Our Second Route - 'Go Home'

We don't necessarily need this route but it's a useful exercise so we're going to create a simple function (and route) to redirect the user back to the home page if any GET request other than those expected is processed.

Here's the function (home) to be added to our routes/donations.js file

router.home = function(req, res) {
  //route to handle all angular requests
  res.sendFile('../public/index.ejs'); // load our public/index.ejs file
}

and our route for app.js

app.get('*', donations.home);