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API & Routes

OUTDATED

This page is part of the documentation for release V1.0. This documentation is outdated and V1.0 is no longer maintained. See index for the latest information.

The OSC website API exists to serve, create, modify, and delete dynamic resources, for instance:

  1. Blog metadata and rendered HTML articles (documented in Developers/API/blog).
  2. Passing contact messages to the SMTP mail server (documented in Developers/API/contact).
  3. Serving the various editable forms (documented in Developers/API/edit).
  4. User authentication (documented in Developers/API/users).

In the source code, each route occupies a separate file in the routes folder, and all routes are subsequently organized in routes/api.js.

Express​

note

Express.js is a backend web framework for creating and serving RESTful APIs on NodeJS. It is documented extensively at expressjs.com.

Expressjs, otherwise known as Express, implements a simple NodeJS web server. It defines a relative routing path and a series of middleware to use with each function. Each middleware is a JavaScript function that accepts an HTTP request (the req variable) and a response object (the res variable). The res variable is an interface for sending responses back to users.

Example:

// An API route served over '/', using the HTTP GET method.
router.get('/', (req, res) => {

	// req holds the user's request.
	const body = req.body
	const someField = body.someField
	const someField2 = body.someField2

	// We respond by interfacing with 'res'
	res.status(200).send({ message: "accepted" })

})

// Other HTTP methods...
router.post('/', (req, res) => { /* ... */ })
router.delete('/', (req, res) => { /* ... */ })
router.put('/', (req, res) => { /* ... */ })

Express Router​

The express router, part of the Expressjs framework, enables developers to create and export APIs modularly. Meaning, an API can be developed according to some relative path (e.g /users), imported into another router, and then served over some other, more abstract path (e.g /api/users). Consider the following example:

File A
const express = require('express')
const router = express.Router()

router.get('/', (req, res) => { /* ... */ }
router.post('/', (req, res) => { /* ... */ }
// ...

module.exports = router

Then, imported into file B:

File B
const express = require('express')
const router = express.Router()

// The API defined in File A.
const myFirstRoute = require('./fileA')

// Serve the API in File A on /mySecondRoute.
router.use('/mySecondRoute', myFirstRoute)

In this way, HTTP routes can be defined in a secure, conveniently testable, and organized manner.