Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By : Nicholas McClay
Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By: Nicholas McClay

Overview of this book

The MEAN Stack is a framework for web application development using JavaScript-based technologies; MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.js. If you want to expand your understanding of using JavaScript to produce a fully functional standalone web application, including the web server, user interface, and database, then this book can help guide you through that transition. This book begins by configuring the frontend of the MEAN stack web application using the Angular JavaScript framework. We then implement common user interface enhancements before moving on to configuring the server layer of our MEAN stack web application using Express for our backend APIs. You will learn to configure the database layer of your MEAN stack web application using MongoDB and the Mongoose framework, including modeling relationships between documents. You will explore advanced topics such as optimizing your web application using WebPack as well as the use of automated testing with the Mocha and Chai frameworks. By the end of the book, you should have acquired a level of proficiency that allows you to confidently build a full production-ready and scalable MEAN stack application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Working with data validations and virtuals in Mongoose

Before we start dealing with relationships between different models, let's cover how to build relationships between the properties of our model and Mongoose.

One of the most common property relationships is validation of what we are saving in our model. This relationship between the value input to the model, and what the model's schema is predefined to allow, helps us by providing an easy to use mechanism to make sure only valid data is saved to MongoDB. Mongoose provides a rich and extensible validation toolkit for handling virtually any type of validation you would want to perform, before persisting it to the database. Validation errors can also be returned in API responses to provide feedback when mistakes are made from the client.

Another powerful feature for extending the capabilities of our models is the use...