Timer based on Express JS GET/POST events - node.js

I am completely lost on this one. I have a simple app that asks 6 questions to a user. Each question and the answers available are shown on a dynamically generated view for a particular questions route. I want to set up a time that works as follows: When question 1 shows, the user has 5 minutes to answer all 6 questions. The timer would clear once the POST for question 6 occurs.
The basis for the GET/POST code is as follows (using the ejs model):
app.get('/survey/:question_number?', restrict, routes.survey);
app.post('/survey/:question_number', function(req, res) {
//question code
}
Here is the export route code:
exports.survey = function(req, res) {
//Question logic to pass to the render
res.render('question', {
info : info
});
}
For the html, it simply uses the passed "info" to generate the questions and answers and then uses a standard form method=post to send the answer selected back to the app.post.
Can anyone recommend a good method to accomplish this that is not overly complex? Thanks!

You should probably use sessions for this task. After the first question is requested you set a session variable, that will indicate the time, when all questions must be answered. After that you just compare this variable value with a current time of a request. I guess it's one of the most simplest approaches to solve your task.

Related

i can't see difference between put and patch method

I just want to like a quote or dislike if already i liked the quote. So first i find the quote and then i check if i already liked the quote, if not then i like, otherwise i dislike.
I have a router like below
router.put('/:quoteId', isAuth, quotesController.likeQuote);
And likeQuote method is like below
module.exports.likeQuote = (req, res, next) => {
const quoteId = req.params.quoteId;
const userId = req.userId;
Quote.findById(quoteId)
.then((quote) => {
if (quote.likes.indexOf(userId) == -1) {
quote.likes.push(userId);
} else {
quote.likes.pull(userId);
}
return quote.save();
})
.then((updatedQuote) => {
res.status(201).json({ message: 'You liked the post!' });
})
.catch((err) => {
err.statusCode = 500;
next(err);
});
But my question is, i just want to know how PUT and PATCH works? I think we should send all the fields in PUT but not in PATCH methods, but in my case i don't even send any fields and both work just fine.How this happens?
The actual REST API methods (PUT, PATCH, ... ) do not have any limitations. the logic you choose to write is what defines this. Now you're asking about "best practices" and whenever you ask about that you will get many different answers. I'll explain my view.
PUT, so the essence of PUT is to replace the existing object completely, that's why people are telling you to send the entire object because when you use PUT what's expected is a complete swap.
PATCH, the essence of PATCH is to update the existing resource. which is in your case what you're looking for, in this case you just send the required fields you need for the update.
Now is it wrong if you write PUT to be an update and not a complete swap? I would argue it is not. As long as you keep consistent logic throughout your app you can build your own "best practices" that will suit your needs.
Now you did tag this question as Mongo related so I would like to introduce to you the concept of piplined updates (for Mongo v4.2+) where you can execute your logic in 1 single update.
Mongo Playground
i just want to know how PUT and PATCH works?
An important distinction to understand is that we don't have a standard for how PUT and PATCH work; that's a implementation detail, and is deliberately hidden behind the "uniform interface".
What we do have is standardized semantics, an agreement about what PUT and PATCH mean.
(This is further complicated by people not being familiar with the standard, and therefore misinterpretations of the meaning are common.)
If the implementation of the request handler doesn't match the semantics of the request, that's OK... but if something goes expensively wrong as a result, it's the fault of the implementation.
PUT and PATCH are both method-tokens that indicate that we are trying to modify the resource identified by the target-uri. In particular, we use those method-tokens when we are trying to make the server's representation of the resource match the representation on the client.
For example, imagine editing a web page. We GET /home.html, change the TITLE element in our copy, and we want to save our changes to the server. How do we do that in HTTP?
One answer is that we send a copy of home.html (with our changes) back to the server, so that the server can save it. That's PUT.
Another answer is that we diff our copy and the server's copy, and send to the server a patch-document that describes the changes that the server should make to it's copy. That's PATCH.
router.put('/:quoteId', isAuth, quotesController.likeQuote);
What this invocation is doing is configuring the framework, so that requests with the PUT method token and a target-uri that matches "/:quoteId" are delegated to the likeQuote method.
And at this level, the framework assumes that you know what you are doing - there's no attempt to verify that "likeQuote" implements PUT semantics. To ensure that the implementation and the request semantics match, you are going to need to do some work (inspect the code, test, etc).
in my case i don't even send any fields and both work just fine.
Right - because the framework assumes that you know what you are doing, and your current implementation doesn't try to access or interpret the body of the HTTP request.
Note: that's a big hint that the request handler not actually implementing PUT/PATCH semantics (how could the server possibly make its copy of the quote look like the client's if it doesn't look at the information the client provided)?
It is okay to use POST; assuming that your implementation is correct, you should not be using methods with remote authoring semantics, because that's not what you are doing. This same implementation attached to a POST route would be fine.
As is, things are broken - you have a mismatch between the request semantics and the handler implementation. Under controlled conditions, you are likely to get away with it. It's entirely possible that you are only going to be invoking this code under controlled conditions.

This is my app I need to understand some models issue and want to understand how it work with frontend (MeanStack) [closed]

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I am using two models for my app here are the models
var mongoose=require("mongoose");
var Schema = mongoose.Schema;
var schema = new Schema({
content:{type:String, required:true},
user:{type:mongoose.Types.Objectid, ref:'User'}
});
module.exports=mongoose.model('message',schema);
var mongoose=require("mongoose");
var Schema = mongoose.Schema;
var schema = new Schema({
firstName:{type:String,required:true},
lastName:{type:String,required:true},
password:{type:String,required:true},
email:{type:String, required:true,unique:true},
});
My two questions are as follow:
1 As for the Schema for every field like firstName I make it required: true So When I use Postman if I don't provide the firstName I will get an error that field required. My question is this can anyone give me a little snippet from the front end if I do not provide the firstname it will give me an error but wait this required is on the back end so how can I get the error on frontend if I don't provide the firstname.
2 Actually what I am doing that when some user sends a message so I get his message and from User collection, I get his id name and last name using reference I know how to do it with postman but I am actually confused about how I can do it from frontend using angular2+. Can anyone help me in this regard providing me with a little front end interface or some code snippet with some explanation which can do this operation?
so it looks like you're probably a bit new to full-stack development, no worries both of these are quite straight forward.
Validation of fields in the frontend and backend
You should be validating input on both the frontend and the backend. On the frontend, you can make use of Angular to check if a field is null or empty, or even run regex checks to see if it's the valid format you expect. How you do this will greatly depend on what your frontend HTML is like. If you want further advise on this I'd suggest opening a new question specifically to address this on the frontend. However, you will find many answers if you just search Stackoverflow for "angular 7 validate input".
To validate on the backend, you will likely want some code that sits inside your express.js endpoint handler. You can check the value that comes through the body, do any checks against it. If it passes then continue on to create your database record, if it doesn't then return an error. If your application is sufficiently large you may also wish to run checks closer to your database models but for now validating at the edge may get you far enough if it's a very small application.
Here is an example of the sort of express.js validation you might use:
router.post("/message", (req, res, next) => {
if (!req.body.firstName) {
return res.status(400).json({error: "a meaningful error message"});
}
// The validation has passed, do whatever you want now
});
Frontend HTTP requests in angular 2+
Making a HTTP call in angular 2 is reasonably straight forward and the documentation provides a full guide on making http calls which I would suggest following.
If you have specific questions or issues with it then feel free to come back and open another question, but since you've not provided the code of your current attempt it's hard to give an answer which will fit your code.

Strapi & react-admin : I'd like to set 'Content-Range' header dynamically when any fetchAll query fires

I'm still a novice web developer, so please bear with me if I miss something fundamental !
I'm creating a backoffice for a Strapi backend, using react-admin.
React-admin library uses a 'data provider' to link itself with an API. Luckily someone already wrote a data provider for Strapi. I had no problem with step 1 and 2 of this README, and I can authenticate to Strapi within my React app.
I now want to fetch and display my Strapi data, starting with Users. In order to do that, quoting Step 3 of this readme : 'In controllers I need to set the Content-Range header with the total number of results to build the pagination'.
So far I tried to do this in my User controller, with no success.
What I try to achieve:
First, I'd like it to simply work with the ctx.set('Content-Range', ...) hard-coded in the controller like aforementioned Step 3.
Second, I've thought it would be very dirty to c/p this logic in every controller (not to mention in any future controllers), instead of having some callback function dynamically appending the Content-Range header to any fetchAll request. Ultimately that's what I aim for, because with ~40 Strapi objects to administrate already and plenty more to come, it has to scale.
Technical infos
node -v: 11.13.0
npm -v: 6.7.0
strapi version: 3.0.0-alpha.25.2
uname -r output: Linux 4.14.106-97.85.amzn2.x86_64
DB: mySQL v2.16
So far I've tried accessing the count() method of User model like aforementioned step3, but my controller doesn't look like the example as I'm working with users-permissions plugin.
This is the action I've tried to edit (located in project/plugins/users-permissions/controllers/User.js)
find: async (ctx) => {
let data = await strapi.plugins['users-permissions'].services.user.fetchAll(ctx.query);
data.reduce((acc, user) => {
acc.push(_.omit(user.toJSON ? user.toJSON() : user, ['password', 'resetPasswordToken']));
return acc;
}, []);
// Send 200 `ok`
ctx.send(data);
},
From what I've gathered on Strapi documentation (here and also here), context is a sort of wrapper object. I only worked with Express-generated APIs before, so I understood this snippet as 'use fetchAll method of the User model object, with ctx.query as an argument', but I had no luck logging this ctx.query. And as I can't log stuff, I'm kinda blocked.
In my exploration, I naively tried to log the full ctx object and work from there:
// Send 200 `ok`
ctx.send(data);
strapi.log.info(ctx.query, ' were query');
strapi.log.info(ctx.request, 'were request');
strapi.log.info(ctx.response, 'were response');
strapi.log.info(ctx.res, 'were res');
strapi.log.info(ctx.req, 'were req');
strapi.log.info(ctx, 'is full context')
},
Unfortunately, I fear I miss something obvious, as it gives me no input at all. Making a fetchAll request from my React app with these console.logs print this in my terminal:
[2019-09-19T12:43:03.409Z] info were query
[2019-09-19T12:43:03.410Z] info were request
[2019-09-19T12:43:03.418Z] info were response
[2019-09-19T12:43:03.419Z] info were res
[2019-09-19T12:43:03.419Z] info were req
[2019-09-19T12:43:03.419Z] info is full context
[2019-09-19T12:43:03.435Z] debug GET /users?_sort=id:DESC&_start=0&_limit=10& (74 ms)
While in my frontend I get the good ol' The Content-Range header is missing in the HTTP Response message I'm trying to solve.
After writing this wall of text I realize the logging issue is separated from my original problem, but if I was able to at least log ctx properly, maybe I'd be able to find the solution myself.
Trying to summarize:
Actual problem is, how do I set my Content-Range properly in my strapi controller ? (partially answered cf. edit 3)
Collateral problem n°1: Can't even log ctx object (cf. edit 2)
Collateral problem n°2: Once I figure out the actual problem, is it feasible to address it dynamically (basically some callback function for index/fetchAll routes, in which the model is a variable, on which I'd call the appropriate count() method, and finally append the result to my response header)? I'm not asking for the code here, just if you think it's feasible and/or know a more elegant way.
Thank you for reading through and excuse me if it was confuse; I wasn't sure which infos would be relevant, so I thought the more the better.
/edit1: forgot to mention, in my controller I also tried to log strapi.plugins['users-permissions'].services.user object to see if it actually has a count() method but got no luck with that either. Also tried the original snippet (Step 3 of aforementioned README), but failed as expected as afaik I don't see the User model being imported anywhere (the only import in User.js being lodash)
/edit2: About the logs, my bad, I just misunderstood the documentation. I now do:
ctx.send(data);
strapi.log.info('ctx should be : ', {ctx});
strapi.log.info('ctx.req = ', {...ctx.req});
strapi.log.info('ctx.res = ', {...ctx.res});
strapi.log.info('ctx.request = ', {...ctx.request});
ctrapi.log.info('ctx.response = ', {...ctx.response});
Ctx logs this way; also it seems that it needs the spread operator to display nested objects ({ctx.req} crash the server, {...ctx.req} is okay). Cool, because it narrows the question to what's interesting.
/edit3: As expected, having logs helps big time. I've managed to display my users (although in the dirty way). Couldn't find any count() method, but watching the data object that is passed to ctx.send(), it's equivalent to your typical 'res.data' i.e a pure JSON with my user list. So a simple .length did the trick:
let data = await strapi.plugins['users-permissions'].services.user.fetchAll(ctx.query);
data.reduce((acc, user) => {
acc.push(_.omit(user.toJSON ? user.toJSON() : user, ['password', 'resetPasswordToken']));
return acc;
}, []);
ctx.set('Content-Range', data.length) // <-- it did the trick
// Send 200 `ok`
ctx.send(data);
Now starting to work on the hard part: the dynamic callback function that will do that for any index/fetchAll call. Will update once I figure it out
I'm using React Admin and Strapi together and installed ra-strapi-provider.
A little boring to paste Content-Range header into all of my controllers, so I searched for a better solution. Then I've found middleware concept and created one that fits my needs. It's probably not the best solution, but do its job well:
const _ = require("lodash");
module.exports = strapi => {
return {
// can also be async
initialize() {
strapi.app.use(async (ctx, next) => {
await next();
if (_.isArray(ctx.response.body))
ctx.set("Content-Range", ctx.response.body.length);
});
}
};
};
I hope it helps
For people still landing on this page:
Strapi has been updated from #alpha to #beta. Care, as some of the code in my OP is no longer valid; also some of their documentation is not up to date.
I failed to find a "clever" way to solve this problem; in the end I copy/pasted the ctx.set('Content-Range', data.length) bit in all relevant controllers and it just worked.
If somebody comes with a clever solution for that problem I'll happily accept his answer. With the current Strapi version I don't think it's doable with policies or lifecycle callbacks.
The "quick & easy fix" is still to customize each relevant Strapi controller.
With strapi#beta you don't have direct access to controller's code: you'll first need to "rewrite" one with the help of this doc. Then add the ctx.set('Content-Range', data.length) bit. Test it properly with RA, so for the other controllers, you'll just have to create the folder, name the file, copy/paste your code + "Search & Replace" on model name.
The "longer & cleaner fix" would be to dive into the react-admin source code and refactorize so the lack of "Content-Range" header doesn't break pagination.
You'll now have to maintain your own react-admin fork, so make sure you're already committed into this library and have A LOT of tables to manage through it (so much that customizing every Strapi controller will be too tedious).
Before forking RA, please remember all the stuff you can do with the Strapi backoffice alone (including embedding your custom React app into it) and ensure it will be worth the trouble.

Should I store a very long array in back-end or front-end?

In my angular application, I have a very long array and would like to put it some where I could access very easily from my front-end don't slow down my application, there are multiple options and I don't which one is the best. Should I store it in:
my API
app.get('models', (req, res) =>{var models = ['m1', 'm2', 'm3', ..., 'mn'];
res.send(models);
});
In API DB:
app.get('models', (req, res) =>{
Models.find({}, (dara, err){
res.send(models);
})
});
in my front-end:
// models.ts
in a variable in my component
any comment will be appreciate.
The answer depends on what you want to do, so:
In the Frontend
Is never a good idea try to have data on your frontend, this implicates that the user will request for a full list of data that will only use or read a few.
If you still consider that you wanna do it there: You can have always in a constant, then you can consume that using local storage(be careful with the space limitation 10MB), global variables or just a file to import
Note: Using suspense or any lazy loading you will be able to avoid sending this data at the same time that everything else.
In the Backend
Yes, is the best place to have information that you need to request, there you can use a DB to store and a GET to request it is the common and best approach.
Note: Avoid send all the list in one request in you can, try indexing or use pagination, for most of the cases you don't need have such big arrays on FE.
But at the end, is more a decision based on what you want to build that only one good answer.
Hope this helps you!

Would the values inside request be mixed up in callback?

I am new to Node.js, and I have been reading questions and answers related with this issue, but still not very sure if I fully understand the concept in my case.
Suggested Code
router.post('/test123', function(req, res) {
someAsyncFunction1(parameter1, function(result1) {
someAsyncFunction2(parameter2, function(result2) {
someAsyncFunction3(parameter3, function(result3) {
var theVariable1 = req.body.something1;
var theVariable2 = req.body.something2;
)}
)}
});
Question
I assume there will be multiple (can be 10+, 100+, or whatever) requests to one certain place (for example, ajax request to /test123, as shown above) at the same time with some variables (something1 and something2). According to this, it would be impossible that one user's theVariable1 and theVariable2 are mixed up with (i.e, overwritten by) the other user's req.body.something1 and req.body.something2. I am wondering if this is true when there are multiple callbacks (three like the above, or ten, just in case).
And, I also consider using res.locals to save some data from callbacks (instead of using theVariable1 and theVariable2, but is it good idea to do so given that the data will not be overwritten due to multiple simultaneous requests from clients?
Each request an Node.js/Express server gets generated a new req object.
So in the line router.post('/test123', function(req, res), the req object that's being passed in as an argument is unique to that HTTP connection.
You don't have to worry about multiple functions or callbacks. In a traditional application, if I have two objects cat and dog that I can pass to the listen function, I would get back meow and bark. Even though there's only one listen function. That's sort of how you can view an Express app. Even though you have all these get and post functions, every user's request is passed to them as a unique entity.

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