Adding a simple GET request support is fairly simple, and you've seen this before already in the app we built. Here is some sample code that responds to a GET request and returns a simple JavaScript object as JSON. Insert the following code in the routes section where we have the // TO DO: Setup endpoints ... waiting comment:
router.get('/test', function(req, res) {
var data = {
name: 'Jason Krol',
website: 'http://kroltech.com'
};
res.json(data);
});Just like we set up viewModel in Chapter 5, Dynamic HTML with Handlebars, we create a basic JavaScript object that we can then send directly as a JSON response using res.json instead of res.render. Let's tweak the function a little bit and change it so that it responds to a GET request against the root URL (that is /) route and returns the JSON data from our movies file. Add this new route after the /test route added previously:
router.get('/', function(req, res) {
res.json(json);
});Note
The res (response) object in Express has a few different methods to send data back to the browser. Each of these ultimately falls back on the base send method, which includes header information, statusCodes, and so on. res.json and res.jsonp will automatically format JavaScript objects into JSON and then send using res.send. res.render will render a template view as a string and then send it using res.send as well.
With that code in place, if we launch the server.js file, the server will be listening for a GET request to the / URL route and will respond with the JSON data of our movies collection. Let's first test it out using the Postman REST Client tool:
GET requests are nice because we could have just as easily pulled that same URL via our browser and received the same result:
However, we're going to use Postman for the remainder of our endpoint testing as it's a little more difficult to send POST and PUT requests using a browser.