Intro to Express Lab

Intro

It's been a long day and you've covered a lot of ground.

It's natural, in fact, expected, to feel "uncomfortable" and confused by Node.js & Express at this point.

As always, the journey toward competence requires practice - so let's get on with it!

Exercise

The goal of the exercise is to put in a rep doing everything that you did during the Express lesson!

However, instead of To Dos, change up the data resource to something else, like students - your call.

This lab is not a deliverable

Bonuses

• Use EJS partial views to make your templates more DRY (see link in Reference section of the lesson) and/or this link.
• Include Materialize, or another CSS framework, if you want your app to look better quickly.

Super Bonus

This is an advanced bonus that previews what we will soon learn in class...

Create a route and view dedicated to displaying a single data resource, such as a single student.

We refer to this as the show route/view, vs. the index route/view.

The key to implementing this feature is route parameters documented in the Route parameters section of the Express Routing guide.

Basically, you can define a route as follows:

app.get('/students/:id', function(req, res) {
  console.log(`The value for the :id route parameter is: ${req.params.id}`);
  res.render('students/show', {student: studentDb.getOne(req.params.id)});
});

To send a matching route from the browser, you can use EJS that generates a hyperlink that looks like:

<a href="/students/<%= student.id %>">
  Click for Details for Student <%= student.id%>
</a>