In-Memory Contact Book

In preparation for our next adventure into databases, lets try building an ultra-simplified database that lives in-memory. Something in-memory is ephemeral, so when our server restarts (either automatically or manually) we'll lose any changes and it will revert to what is in the code.

Setup

  1. Navigate to our code on your local computer
  2. Pull the latest code git pull
  3. Check out the sample branch: git checkout contact-book
  4. Install the packages npm install
  5. Do the task(s)!
  6. Submit your assignment to me by sending your app.js file on Slack—no need to send the entire project, just that one file.

Your Task

Rating: Green Circle (Easier)

Create two routes (paths) to read contact(s) from our contacts list (stored in the variable contacts.

  1. The first path should be GET /contacts that lists all the contacts in our "DB".

  2. The second path should be /contacts/:id where the :id part of the URL is the ID of the contact we're looking for. So /contacts/2 will get us the contact with ID 2.

    Hint: See this section https://expressjs.com/en/guide/using-middleware.html#middleware.application

Rating: Blue Square (Intermediate)

In addition the above tasks, extend the GET /contacts route to filter contacts. Your search filter doesn't need to be advanced, but should be passed to your action by a query parameter. So /contacts?name=Aaron should list all contacts that have the name Aaron in the first or last name. You can ignore cases.

Hint: Try using the array method filter

Rating: Black Diamond (Hard!)

In addition to the above tasks, add two more routes: 1. A route to create a contact /contacts. (Hint: Choose the right HTTP verb to distinguish from the first task). Generate an ID that doesn't conflict with the existing IDs in the "DB" but don't need to be contiguous. So if you delete one there may be a skipped number. 2. A route to delete a contact by ID /contacts/:id. (Hint choose a logical HTTP verb!)