Hoot Back-End Index Hoots

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able to create an index route to retrieve all hoots from the database and send this data as a JSON response to the client.

Overview

In this section, we will create a new route to find all hoots. This route will be a GET request to /hoots, and will return a JSON response with all the hoots in the database.

We will be following these specs when building the route:

CRUD Action: READ
Method: GET
Path: /hoots
Response: JSON
Success Status Code: 200 Ok
Success Response Body: An array of all the hoots in the database named hoots. The array will be empty if there are no hoots in the database.
Error Status Code: 500 Internal Server Error
Error Response Body: A JSON object with an error key and a message describing the error.

Define the route

Our route will listen for GET requests on '/hoots':

GET /hoots

Inside controllers/hoots.js, add the following:

// controllers/hoots.js

router.get("/", verifyToken, async (req, res) => {
  // new route
});

❗ A user needs to be logged in to view a list of hoots, so be sure to include the verifyToken middleware.

💡 Restricting access to the index and show functionality will reduce the amount of conditional rendering we need to implement in our React app.

Code the controller function

Let’s breakdown what we’ll accomplish inside our controller function.

We’ll call upon the find({}) method of our Hoot model, retrieving all hoots from the database. When we call upon find({}), we’ll chain two additional methods to the end.

The first is the populate() method. We’ll use this to populate the author property of each hoot with a user object.
The second is the sort() method. We’ll use this to sort hoots in descending order, meaning the most recent entries will be at the at the top.

Once the new hoots are retrieved, we’ll send a JSON response containing the hoots array.

Add the following to controllers/hoots.js:

// controllers/hoots.js

router.get("/", verifyToken, async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const hoots = await Hoot.find({})
      .populate("author")
      .sort({ createdAt: "desc" });
    res.status(200).json(hoots);
  } catch (err) {
    res.status(500).json({ err: err.message });
  }
});

Test the route in Postman

Now that we have finished the route let’s test it with Postman. We’ll do this by sending a GET request to /hoots.

Within Postman, create a new GET request. We’ll name this request Index.

Your Postman URL should look like this:

http://localhost:3000/hoots

💡 Remember to include your token.

If your request was successful, the response will include an array of hoot objects, with a populated author property inside each hoot object:

Index response