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Define your REST API

In this section, we're going to define the set of API Routes / Endpoints / URLs that we need to build for our application, based on the data model and the functions we put together in Work with Data in Javascript.

We'll define our APIs using the REST design pattern

Resources​

We have 3 resources, users, chatrooms, and messages.

We defined the following functions to work with our resources:

  • createUser()
  • createChatroom()
  • joinChatroom()
  • viewMyChatrooms()
  • sendMessage()

We'll create an API Route for every function we have, following the REST Guidelines.

URLs​

Create a user​

POST /user

With expected body:

{ "name": "da335" }

Create a Chatroom​

POST /chatroom - to create a chatroom with provided data

With expected body:

{ "name": "2023-cs-5356-class" }

Join Chatroom​

PUT /chatroom/id - to join a chatroom with a particular id. No body expected.

View My Chatrooms​

There are multiple ways you can do this one.

Option 1) - GET /chatrooms - to get all chatrooms, already filtered down to your user.

If you want to show available chatrooms for a user to join, this may be problematic.

Option 2) - GET /user/chatrooms - get all the chatrooms that are specific to the current user

/chatrooms is nested underneath /user. It becomes slightly more explicit that these are the chatrooms for a particular user. This allows us to still have GET /chatrooms URL to view available chatrooms.

Option 3) GET /chatrooms?filter=mine - to get all chatrooms with a filter that we define

This makes use of query parameters - a set of key=value pairs, starting with ? - used as a way of providing options to a particular URL.

All 3 are perfectly valid, although some are more clear than others.

Send a Message​

Option 1) POST /chatroom/id/message - to create a message for a particular chatroom ID

Option 2) POST /message - to create a message using the provided data

With expected body:

{ "message": "hello!" }

Now that we have a set of URLs to work with our Data Model, we can start coding up our API server to match.