Hoot Back-End Create Comment

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will be able build a route that creates a comment associated with a specific hoot.

Overview

In this section, we will make a route to create a new hoot. This route will be a POST request to /hoots/<hoot_id>/comments, and will return a JSON response with the new comment. The purpose of this route is to handle data that is sent along with a form submission.

We will be following these specs when building the route:

• CRUD Action: CREATE
• Method: POST
• Path: /hoots/<hoot_id>/comments
• Response: JSON
• Success Status Code: 201 Created
• Success Response Body: A new hoot object
• 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

Next we’ll define a route that listens for POST requests on /hoots/<hoot_id>/comments:

POST /hoots/<hoot_id>/comments

We’ll make use of our @token_required decorator, as only a logged in user should be able to create a comment.

Add the following to comments_blueprint.py:

@comments_blueprint.route('/hoots/<hoot_id>/comments', methods=['POST'])
@token_required

🏆 Any route that requires auth should include the @token_required decorator. These are our protected routes.

Code the controller function

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

Our function will use the connection cursor to execute the following SQL query:

INSERT INTO comments (hoot, author, text)
VALUES (%s, %s, %s)
RETURNING *

This query inserts a new comment into the comments table. The columns hoot, author, and text will be populated with the provided values. The RETURNING * clause ensures that all columns of the newly inserted comment are returned.

After inserting the new row in the comments table, our function will respond to the request with the created_comment as JSON data.

Add the following to comments_blueprint.py:

@comments_blueprint.route('/hoots/<hoot_id>/comments', methods=['POST'])
@token_required
def create_comment(hoot_id):
    try:
        new_comment_data = request.get_json()
        new_comment_data["author"] = g.user["id"]

        connection = get_db_connection()
        cursor = connection.cursor(cursor_factory=psycopg2.extras.RealDictCursor)

        cursor.execute("""
                        INSERT INTO comments (hoot, author, text)
                        VALUES (%s, %s, %s)
                        RETURNING *
                        """,
                        (hoot_id, new_comment_data['author'], new_comment_data['text'])
        )
        created_comment = cursor.fetchone()
        connection.commit()
        connection.close()
        return jsonify({"comment": created_comment}), 201
    except Exception as error:
        return jsonify({"error": str(error)}), 500

Test the route in Postman

Now that we have the route, let’s test it with Postman.

We’ll do this by sending a POST request to the following URL:

http://127.0.0.1:5000/hoots/4/comments

💡 Be sure to update this with a hoot id value that exists in your database!

The body of your request should look like the following:

{
  "text": "Comment text"
}

If the request is successful, you should see a response like the one below:

{
  "comment": {
    "author": 4,
    "hoot": 4,
    "id": 1,
    "text": "Comment text"
  }
}