Lesson 7: Store API (Query Params)

Lesson page

This week, students complete the Store API assignment (04) from start to finish.

Students will build out complex filtering and sorting options on a Rest API endpoint:

The idea is that one can search by any or all of these attributes: featured, name, price, rating, company. For the numeric fields price and rating, one can also specify greater than, less than, or equal to. One can also specify a sort order. Also one can specify a skip and a limit, to facilitate pagination through the result

Hard Parts

This assignment asks the student to learn and put together a lot of different concepts using the mongoose ORM. The biggest thing that will likely trip students up is the Regex used to handle the numericFilters query parameter. Here is an example answer (with the help of ChatGPT 😅) explaining how the Regex and the surrounding code works

The code also involves a bit of string manipulation for the numericFilters, sort, and fields query parameters in order to convert a human-friendly value that allows including multiple model fields into the type of value that mongoose is expecting. Be prepared to walk students through those steps. Lastly, we do a bit of the common offset (or in this case skip) + limit pagination at the end there; make sure that students understand how that’s working.