Project 3 - Online Store App - Dealio (Back-End)

A online store app/server by Guillermo Aviles, Hiram Rodriguez, and Nghia (Nathan) Vo

Project Overview

The online store app would be the place where the users can freely buy any available items on the sites, sell an item by creating a new post, add a review/comment to an existing item. The app give the users the freedom to buy and sell without paying any fees or restrictions.

This repository is the back-end respository for the app.
The back-end is deployed on Heroku: here
The front-end is deployed on Vercel: here
The associated front-end repository can be found: here

About this API

Information

This is a Open API — full CRUD method is available on resources. No authentication is required to access this API, and all resources are fully open and available.

Installation

Clone this repository to your labs folder and change directory into it.
Run npm i to download required dependencies.
Run node db/seeb/seed-Item.js to seed file.
Run nodemon index.js to run localhost

Resources Lists

item(endpoint) - it will return a list of items in the database.

GET - https://online-store.herokuapp.com/api/online-store/{endpoint}/

{
        "_id": "63988bd9f91cde2357339ea3",
        "title": "Roomba® 694 Robot Vacuum",
        "description": "Robot vacuum with core cleaning features that allow for a complete clean. Thoughtful intelligence with iRobot OS software. Ideal for routine cleaning.",
        "images": "https://cdn.media.amplience.net/i/irobot/R694020_1?fmt=auto&$pdp-img-desktop-retina-prd$&img404=404&v=1&locale=en-US,*",
        "price": 179.99,
        "__v": 0
    }

comments(endpoint) - return you a list of all comments.

GET - https://online-store.herokuapp.com/api/online-store/{endpoint}/

{
        "_id": "63935496939d6b735fc9dcdf",
        "user": "User",
        "body": "Test",
        "item": "6393544e4781b87afb2a5055",
        "__v": 0
    }

items(endpoint): return you the detailed information on a specific item.

GET https://online-store.herokuapp.com/api/online-store/items/{_id}

"_id": "63988bd9f91cde2357339ea3",
        "title": "Roomba® 694 Robot Vacuum",
        "description": "Robot vacuum with core cleaning features that allow for a complete clean. Thoughtful intelligence with iRobot OS software. Ideal for routine cleaning.",
        "images": "https://cdn.media.amplience.net/i/irobot/R694020_1?fmt=auto&$pdp-img-desktop-retina-prd$&img404=404&v=1&locale=en-US,*",
        "price": 179.99,
        "__v": 0

comments(endpoint): return you a list of comment about a specific item

GET https://online-store.herokuapp.com/api/online-store/comments/{item}

{
        "_id": "6399e28d4ed9197ba2809e6f",
        "user": "Waatch_Freak",
        "body": "Camped outside the Swatch store for a day and a half to get one of these only to find out they were out of stock. Luckily I was able to get my hand on one over here. Love it!",
        "item": "6399da674ed9197ba2809e15",
        "__v": 0
    },
    {
        "_id": "6399e2b84ed9197ba2809e73",
        "user": "Sandy",
        "body": "On my Christmas wishlist",
        "item": "6399da674ed9197ba2809e15",
        "__v": 0
    }

Deployment

The back-end of our application is a MongoDB, Express and Node with two models that includes a schema for Item and for Comment. It follows RESTful architecture in naming and functionality of all available endpoints. Create, Read, Update, and Destroy (CRUD) was built in throughout the app. The back-end composes the following technologies/platforms:

Heroku:

Heroku is a container-based cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers use Heroku to deploy, manage, and scale modern apps. The platform is elegant, flexible, and easy to use, offering developers the simplest path to getting our apps to market. Heroku plays a crucial part in our back-end server/app.

MongoDB Atlas:

MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. According to General Assembly, "even though SQL databases have been around for much longer, NoSQL databases have gained in popularity in recent years as the amount of user-generated data on web applications has grown exponentially. NoSQL databases like MongoDB lend themselves well to rapid app development use cases such as coding sprints and Agile settings. Anytime you have large amounts of data with little or no structure, unknown requirements, or when data is increasing at a very high rate, a flexible and scaleable database like MongoDB would be an ideal choice."

Postman:

Postman is a great tool when trying to dissect RESTful APIs made by others or test ones you have made yourself. It offers a sleek user interface with which to make HTML requests, without the hassle of writing a bunch of code just to test an API's functionality. (Digitalcrafts)

Vercel:

Vercel is the most accessible platform to deploy websites. By connecting the ** your GitHub repository** to Vercel, you can simply deploy the main branch to Vercel domains — and it does all the heavy lifting for you. (Julian Wallis)

Req-Res Diagram

Before

After

User Stories

AAU, I want to be able to add new information about an item into the database.
AAU, I want to be able to update the information on an existing item to the database.
AAU, I want to able to retrieve information about an item from the database.
AAU, I want to be able to delete information about an existing item in the database.

Component Development

Our main component includes:

Planning directory: to help with project development and planning.
Controllers directory: two separate file for managing our API request and responses.
Data directory: contains two file with already-made JSON data to test our localhost in the first phase of the project.
Seed directory: contains file to seed already-made JSON into localhost database.
Connection file: contain file to connect to MongoDB.
Models directory: contains two file that have schema properties and values.
Issue MD: a text file so we can note existing but affecting the functionality of the app so we can address later. Or anything that we anticipated to be a problem in the future.

Project Management

The team followed the daily SCRUM protocols and met for a 5 to 10 minutes a day to discuss small wins, achievements, any blockers, unresolved issues, obstacles that we were encountering. We also met before the day end to discuss any working plans and small goals for the next days.As for the Git workflow, we follow the 'Feature Branch' method where we have the inital code set-up in the main branch. Everyone who is working will branch out to dev branch to work and push up the code accordingly. Guillermo, who is our Git Manager, then reviewed the latest code with the team to validate the code. He then will submit a pull request and merged that PR to the dev branch. Once our code met MVP, he then merge code to main branch for deployment to Heroku. The team was committed to collabrate creatively and equally. We tried to be mindful of that and divided the work so that everyone at least working on something on both back-end and front-end.

Code Snippet

We are especially proud of this code because it allows us to make one single call in the front end when we delete an item, it will also find all the comments that associated item's ObjectId and delete them as well. This code makes our code DRY and still it achieves the functionality that we aim for.

router.delete("/deleteItem/:id", async (req, res, next) => {
  try {
    const deleteItem = await Item.findOneAndDelete({ _id: req.params.id })
    const deleteComments = await Comment.deleteMany({item: req.params.id})
    .then((item) => {
      res.sendStatus(204)
    })
  } catch (err) {
    next(err)
  }
});

Issues & Resolutions

One of the issues we encountered during our project was when adding a new comment, we intended that if a user wanted to stayed anonymous, he/she could leave the 'name' field empty and it would show up automatically as 'Anonymous'. However, when we tested this out, it only left an empty string instead of 'Anonymous' as intended. We initially thought we had to modify our Comment Schema, but Hayk, who is one our Teaching Associates, suggested that we add the code below to the POST request. It then worked wonderfully. Thank you Hayk again.

router.post("/newComment/:id", async (req, res, next) => {
  try {
    req.body.user = req.body.user ? req.body.user : "Anonymous"
    req.body.item = req.params.id;
    const newComment = await Comment.create(req.body);
    res.status(201).json(newComment);
  } catch (err) {
    next(err);
  }
});

guillermoaviles / online-store-be Goto Github PK

online-store-be's Introduction