COVIDiary pt. 5 - Backend Routing

Welcome to Part 5 of the COVIDiary project! If you’re just joining us or missed a post, here’s what we’ve done so far:

• Part 1: Project Introduction
• Part 2: Initial Setup
• Part 3: Building the Database
• Part 4: Frontend Setup
• Part 4.5: Database Fixes

This week’s post was super duper long, and it covered lots and lots of code across the front and back end. My inner editor put her foot down, and I have now broken that massive tome into not one, but four smaller posts that focus on specific concepts or tasks.

If you want to skip ahead, you can check out my progress in the CD-API and CD-Client repositories on GitHub. I’ll continue working on the project as these blog posts release over the coming weeks.

Today, we’re going to work on the back end. By the end of today, we will have all our backend routing configured and ready to go.

Open your CD-API repository.

Namespace Routes

We’ll start by configuring our routes. We want to add /api to our backend routes so we can better keep things straight.

To keep our files organized, make an /api directory in your /controllers directory, and place your controllers within it.

Note: You probably don’t have the users_controller.rb yet. If that’s the case, now is a perfect time to add it. In your terminal, run rails g controller api/users.

Now we’ll wrap our resources within an /api namespace in our config/routes.rb file:

rails.application.routes.draw do

  # wrap routes in /api namespace

  namespace :api do

    # create index route for all entries at /api/entries

    resources :entries

    # create routes for users at /api/users

    resources :users

  end

end

We only want /api/entries so we can see the list of all public entries. We want to nest our CRUD actions for specific entries under specific users. Let’s make some minor changes to accomplish this.

rails.application.routes.draw do

  namespace :api do

    # creates index route for all entries at /api/entries

    resources :entries, only: [:index]

    resources :users do

      # create all CRUD routes for a specific user's entries at api/users/:user_id/entries

      resources :entries

    end

  end

end

At this point, you can run rails routes in your terminal to see all the routes we’ve just created.

Coming Up

We are one step closer to hooking up our front and back ends. Next week, we’ll format our data so we can send it to our client app. We’re making progress!