Book Image

Advanced Express Web Application Development

By : Andrew Keig
Book Image

Advanced Express Web Application Development

By: Andrew Keig

Overview of this book

Building an Express application that is reliable, robust, maintainable, testable, and can scale beyond a single server requires a bit of extra thought and effort. Express applications that need to survive in a production environment will need to reach out to the Node ecosystem and beyond, for support.You will start by laying the foundations of your software development journey, as you drive-out features under test. You will move on quickly to expand on your existing knowledge, learning how to create a web API and a consuming client. You will then introduce a real-time element in your application.Following on from this, you will begin a process of incrementally improving your application as you tackle security, introduce SSL support, and how to handle security vulnerabilities. Next, the book will take you through the process of scaling and then decoupling your application. Finally, you will take a look at various ways you can improve your application's performance and reliability.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Advanced Express Web Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Validating parameters with param middleware


You will have noticed that we have repeated the id validation in each of our routes. Let's improve things using app.params.

Here is the offending line of code that simply checks to see if our id is a valid MongoDB id:

if (req.params.id.match(/^[0-9a-fA-F]{24}$/) == null)
  return res.json(400, 'Bad Request');

Let's add a middleware to handle this ./lib/middleware/id.js. We define a validate function that takes four parameters, with the last being the value of id. We then validate the id parameter, returning a 400 Bad Request, if it's invalid. We then call next(), which calls the next middleware in our Express stack:

exports.validate = function(req, res, next, id){
  if (id.match(/^[0-9a-fA-F]{24}$/) == null)
  return res.json(400, 'Bad Request');
  next();
}

Now we can use this id middleware in our Express server. Let's include the param middleware and add this line before the first route so that it applies to all of our routes: ./lib/express/index...