This challenge allows you to practice the concepts and techniques learned over the past Sprint and apply them in a concrete project. This Sprint explored Building RESTful Web APIs with Express and Node.js, Server-side Routing, Express Middleware & Deployment and Good Practices. In your challenge for this Sprint, you will demonstrate proficiency by creating an Web API using Node.js and Express.
Read these instructions carefully. Understand exactly what is expected before starting this Sprint Challenge.
This is an individual assessment. All work must be your own. Your challenge score is a measure of your ability to work independently using the material covered through this sprint. You need to demonstrate proficiency in the concepts and objectives introduced and practiced in preceding days.
You are not allowed to collaborate during the Sprint Challenge. However, you are encouraged to follow the twenty-minute rule and seek support from your Team Lead and Instructor in your cohort help channel on Slack. Your work reflects your proficiency Building RESTful APIs with Node.js and Express; and your command of the concepts and techniques taught during the Express and Node.js, Server-side Routing, Express Middleware & Deployment and Good Practices modules.
You have three hours to complete this challenge. Plan your time accordingly.
Commit your code regularly and meaningfully. This helps both you (in case you ever need to return to old code for any number of reasons and your Team Lead).
In this challenge, create a web API around the following resources: Projects and Actions.
Demonstrate your understanding of this Sprint's concepts by answering the following free-form questions. Edit this document to include your answers after each question. Make sure to leave a blank line above and below your answer so it is clear and easy to read by your Team Lead.
- Mention two parts of Express that you learned about this week.
Routing Middleware
- Describe Middleware?
Middleware is an array of functions that connects network-based requests generated by a client to the back-end data the client is requesting,they get executed in the order they are introduced into the server code.
- Describe a Resource?
A resource is an object with a type, associated data, relationships to other resources, and a set of methods that operate on it.
- What can the API return to help clients know if a request was successful?
API can send status code and message as response to client.
- How can we partition our application into sub-applications?
We can use server-side routing to achieve this goal.
Follow these steps to set up and work on your project:
- Create a forked copy of this project.
- Add your Team Lead as collaborator on Github.
- Clone your forked version of the Repository.
- Create a new Branch on the clone: git checkout -b
<firstName-lastName>. - Implement the project on this Branch, committing changes regularly.
- Push commits: git push origin
<firstName-lastName>.
Follow these steps for completing your project.
- Submit a Pull-Request to merge Branch into master on your fork. Please don't merge your own pull request.
- Add your Team Lead as a Reviewer on the Pull-request
- Your Team Lead will count the challenge as done by merging the branch into master.
Please read the following before implementing the Minimum Viable Product:
The /data/helpers folder includes files you can use to manage the persistence of project and action data. These files are projectModel.js and actionModel.js. Both files publish the following api, which you can use to store, modify and retrieve each resource:
All these helper methods return a promise. Please you .then().catch() or async/await
get(): calling get returns an array of all the resources contained in the database. If you pass anidto this method it will return the resource with that id if one is found.insert(): calling insert passing it a resource object will add it to the database and return the newly created resource.update(): accepts two arguments, the first is theidof the resource to update, and the second is an object with thechangesto apply. It returns the updated resource. If a resource with the providedidis not found, the method returnsnull.remove(): the remove method accepts anidas it's first parameter and, upon successfully deleting the resource from the database, returns the number of records deleted.
The projectModel.js helper includes an extra method called getProjectActions() that takes a project id as it's only argument and returns a list of all the actions for the project.
- Configure an npm script named "server" that will execute your code using nodemon. Make nodemon be a development time dependency only, it shouldn't be deployed to production.
- Configure an npm script named "start" that will execute your code using node.
Design and build the necessary endpoints to:
- Perform CRUD operations on projects and actions. When adding an action, make sure the
project_idprovided belongs to an existingproject. If you try to add an action with anidof 3 and there is no project with thatidthe database will return an error. - Retrieve the list of actions for a project.
The schemas (properties and data type of each property) used to store and retrieve the resources inside the included database (lambda.sqlite3) is described below.
| Field | Data Type | Metadata |
|---|---|---|
| id | number | no need to provide it when creating projects, the database will generate it |
| name | string | required. |
| description | string | required. |
| completed | boolean | used to indicate if the project has been completed, not required |
| Field | Data Type | Metadata |
|---|---|---|
| id | number | no need to provide it when creating posts, the database will automatically generate it. |
| project_id | number | required, must be the id of an existing project. |
| description | string | up to 128 characters long, required. |
| notes | string | no size limit, required. Used to record additional notes or requirements to complete the action. |
| completed | boolean | used to indicate if the action has been completed, not required |
We have provided test data for all the resources.
Now that we have a way to add, update, remove and retrieve data from the provided database, it's time to work on the API.
- Use
create-react-appto create an application in a separate folder (outside the API project folder). Name it anything you want. - From the React application show a list of all projects using the API you built.
- Add functionality to show the details of a project, including its actions, when clicking a project name in the list. Use React Router to navigate to a separate route to show the project details.
- Add styling! Perhaps with
styled-components.