Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

By : Valentin Bojinov
Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

By: Valentin Bojinov

Overview of this book

When building RESTful services, it is really important to choose the right framework. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exactly the right choice for building RESTful APIs. This third edition of RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 will teach you to create scalable and rich RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform. You will be introduced to the latest NPM package handler and understand how to use it to customize your RESTful development process. You will begin by understanding the key principle that makes an HTTP application a RESTful-enabled application. After writing a simple HTTP request handler, you will create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects; explore using the NoSQL database, MongoDB, to store data; and get to grips with using self-descriptive URLs. You’ll learn to set accurate HTTP status codes along with understanding how to keep your applications backward-compatible. Also, while implementing a full-fledged RESTful service, you will use Swagger to document the API and implement automation tests for a REST-enabled endpoint with Mocha. Lastly, you will explore some authentication techniques to secure your application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Database modeling with Mongoose


Mongoose is a module that connects Node.js to MongoDB in an object document mapper (ODM) style. It offers the Create, Read, Update, and Delete (also known as CRUD) functionalities for documents stored in the database. Mongoose defines the structure of the used documents using schemas. The schema is the smallest unit of data definition in Mongoose. A model is built out of a schema definition. It is a constructor-like function that can be used to create or query documents. Documents are instances of a model and represent one-to-one mapping to the documents stored in MongoDB. The schema-model-document hierarchy provides a self-descriptive way of defining objects and allows easy data validation.

Let's start by installing Mongoose with npm:

npm install mongoose

Now that we have the Mongoose module installed, our first step will be to define a schema that will represent an item in the catalog:

var mongoose = require('mongoose'); 
var Schema = mongoose.Schema;
var itemSchema...