Week 12 Tutorial: Restful Service

COMP5347: Web Application Development
Week 12 Tutorial: Restful Service
Learning Objectives
• Understand how to create and consume restful service in Node.js
Part 1: Add request module
Task: Download the provided week12-src.zip from Canvas and extract the content
in a directory. Start Eclipse, select “open projects from file system” under file menu, go
to the directory you just extracted the content and click open. In this case, all the
necessary node modules are specified in package.json. Right click it on the project
explorer panel, select Run as then npm install.
Optional: Just keep in mind, in your own project, you need to run the following
command in the terminal to install install mongoose manually.
npm install request --save
Save the file and right click it on the project explorer panel to Run As then npm update.
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Part 2: Create Restful API
Task: Start the mongodb server using the following command, replace the “path” with a
path to the local mongodb working directory where you create in Week 9 the
wikipedia database with the revisions collections.
mongod --dbpath path
Run the code by right click the /app/models/mongoose.revisions.js on project
explorer panel and run as node.js application.
Optional: line 3, the connection to mongodb is configured. If you give a different name
to the Wikipedia data set when you import the data, the configuration might be different.
In this case, you can replace the “dbname” in the following path with the name you
created before. If you are not sure about the dbname, you may open the robomongo db
browser and check it there.
‘mongodb:://localhost/dbname’
Right click reverser.js on the explorer panel and Run as Node.js
application. Open the browser and go to
localhost:3000/revisions/revisions/BBC. You will see something looks like
the screenshot below.
Check RevisionSchema.statics.getByTitle in app/models/revisions.js. A simple
callback function is defined here to query to database with given article title. In
app/controllers/revision.server.cotroller.js, a controller is defined to return the
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query results as JSON objects. Overall, a REST API is created that accepts GET request with
given article title and returns the results in JSON format.
Part 3: Consume REST Service
In this part, you are required to implement a parser which can parse the JSON objects returned
from REST API and output the associated results in console.
In request.js, a request URL/endpoint is constructed with associated attributes. When
you query this URL, JSON objects will be returns with the structure blow.
Now please implement the parse which will check if the URL above is available, output
the service status in console. if it is available, please parse the returned JSON objects
and output how many unique users have made revisions to article “Australia”.