tworkman512/restful-api-example

Full Stack API

Today we are going to build a full-stack API from scratch.

Description

We will be building an API that can manage evening courses, participants, and faculty at UW. That means we should be able to:

• Create new courses
• Create and assign students to a course
• Create and assign faculty to a course

Data & Fields

We will want to be able to capture the following information:

Courses

• Name of the course
• Start Date for the course
• End Date for the course
• Location including building address and room number

Students

• First and last name
• Preferred name or nickname
• Email address

Faculty

• First and last name
• Preferred name or nickname
• Email address
• Role

Features

In addition to basic CRUD operations, we will also want to be able to:

• Provide an endpoint for a course that returns a random student to call on during class

• GET /courses/:id/students/random
  • Math.random()

• Provide an endpoint that will mark attendance for a student for a specified date

• PATCH /students/:id

CRUD "RESTful" API Design It's more than just CRUD. We want to make the correct requests based off of actions and return the correct responses with status codes.

GET ALL - GET - /books - 200 Convention is you use a plural name here.

GET ONE - GET - /books/:id - 200 Convention is to use some unique identifier. //* CAN'T FIND IT - 404

CREATE - POST - /books - 201 //* VALIDATION ERROR - 400/422

UPDATE - PUT/PATCH - /books/:id - 200 //* Put - you are replacing the entire thing //* Patch - you are replacing only a part...only one or more valid fields. //* CAN'T FIND IT - 404 //* VALIDATION ERROR - 400/422

DESTROY - DELETE - /books/:id - 200 //* CAN'T FIND IT - 404