notes-api

An API that allows you to manage notes

Prerequisites

Node.js
npm
MongoDB

How to run

Clone the repo
Run npm install
Start a MongoDB instance
Replace the connection string in server.js with the connection string for your instance
Run node server.js

Instructions to the UX team

The API has the following functionality:

Retrieve a note
Retrieve all the notes
Create a new note
Update a note
Delete a note
Delete all the notes
Archive a note

All requests and responses should conform to the JSON:API specification. Essentially, to make a request to the API, make the request to the correct URL (either /notes or /notes/:noteId) and, if the request requires that you include a note as the body, format it as JSON like so:

{
    "data": {
        "id": "[id]",
        "type": "note",
        "attributes": {
            "title": "[Note title]",
            "body": "[Note body]",
            "archived": false
        }
    }
}

(id is not required if you are creating a new note)

If a note is included in the response to a request, it will be formatted like this also.

Retrieve a note

GET /notes/:noteId

Returns a single note from the database according to its id.

Retrieve all the notes

GET /notes

Returns all the notes in the database. They'll be returned as an array under the data key.

Create a new note

POST /notes

Stores the note included in the body of the request in the database.

Update a note

PATCH /notes/:noteId

Updates the note with the corresponding id in the database by replacing it with the note included in the body of the request.

Delete a note

DELETE /notes/:noteId

Delete the note with the corresponding id from the database.

Delete all the notes

DELETE /notes

Delete all the notes from the database.

Archive a note

PATCH /notes/:noteId

Whether a note is archived or not is determined by a flag on each note. Therefore, to archive a note, simply update it and set its archived flag to true.

Choice of technology

I chose to use JavaScript and Node.js since they are well established tools for creating backend software and APIs and I was already familiar with them. I chose to use MongoDB since it was simple to use and had a great package for Node.js (Mongoose) for handling queries from within the API. I used Mocha and Chai for testing since they had good tools for testing APIs (chai-http specifically). I considered using Java to build the API since I had experience in that but I thought that JavaScript would be better since it's already designed for use in the web and I felt that it was more lightweight and therefore appropriate for the task.

If I had more time

If I had more time I would likely extend the API to have more features, perhaps the option to incorporate some sort of to-do-list feature into the note so that you can have notes and to-do-lists in the same place. I might also store additional information about notes including created date, edited date, colour, etc. I might also rework the archiving feature to store notes in a separate table in the database or separate database entirely so that it's more akin to a traditional archive rather than simply being a UI trick.

atjallen/notes-api