Evolution of a Node.js API, Zoe.js — Project Specification

4 min readJul 20, 2020

The project what we’re going to build is a part of an application, it’s a core module, an ordering system API.

Suppose you have a webshop or basically any kind of application where you can buy products. Ordering is a fundamental module of this application, where you have products and orders. Additionally, this application has users they can be customers or admins.

The project is not complicated, but it’s complex enough to present all the components what I mentioned in the Introduction chapter.

Specification

The purpose of this specification is to give you the description of the Project. This is the place where you can come back time-to-time during the series to know what we build.

Based on the project description you can identify 3 resources:

users
products
orders

Now I’m going through all the resources and show the data structure, the available actions and the relationships. Data structure lists the properties that a resource has and we store it in the database. Available actions are the REST actions on the resources. And we also have relationships between the resources, for example an order has products.

Bird’s eye view

Order model has a customer. It’s an ObjectId reference to the User Model.
Order model has products. This is not a reference, only a schema connection, we store individual product data to keep the product data snapshot.
Order model has productQuantities. This is a Javascript Map type, it stores how many products does an order have.

Users

You can create a user individually.

Data structure

username — String, unique, required — this basically an id
password — String, required
role — String— customer or admin

{
  "username": "adammbalogh",
  "password": "password",
  "role": "admin"
}

Actions

Read users — GET /users - authenticated URI, needs admin role
Read a user — GET /users/:id - authenticated URI, customer can read himself, anyway needs admin role
Create a user — POST /users - authenticated URI, needs admin role
Create a user via CLI

Products

You can create a product individually.

Data structure

id — String, unique, required
name — String, required
price — Number, required — stored in dollar cents, 50000 dollar cents is 500 dollar

{
  "id": "PID6112",
  "name": "Samsung UE55TU8002 LED TV",
  "price": 50000
}

Actions

Everyone can read products but only admins can create, delete or update it (manage).

Read products — GET /products - non-authenticated URI
Read a product — GET /products/:id - non-authenticated URI
Create a product — POST /products - authenticated URI, needs admin role
Update a product — PATCH /products/:id - authenticated URI, needs admin role
Delete a product — DELETE /products/:id - authenticated URI, needs admin role

Orders

To create an order you need a customer and at least 1 product.

Data structure

id — String, unique, required
amount — Number, required
orderedAt - Date - current time by default
products - required - products, stored as entire data structure to keep Product history
productQuantities - required - stores the quantity for each product
customer - required - user model

{
  "id": "OID8815",
  "products": [
    {
      "id": "PID6112",
      "quantity": 1
    },
    {
      "id": "PID221",
      "quantity": 5
    }
  ],
  "customerUsername": "adammbalogh"
}

Actions

Read orders — GET /orders - authenticated URI, needs admin role
Read an order — GET /orders/:id - authenticated URI, customer can read his order, anyway needs admin role
Read a product from an order — GET /orders/:id/products/:product_id - authenticated URI, customer can read his order, anyway needs admin role
Create an order — POST /orders - authenticated URI, customer can do this, task: send email to customer

Next chapter

Evolution of a Node.js API, Zoe.js — Workspace Setup

Chapter 7

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Chapters

Evolution of a Node.Js API, Zoe.Js — Introduction

Chapter 1

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Evolution of a Node.Js API, Zoe.Js — Node.Js

Chapter 2

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Evolution of a Node.js API, Zoe.js — Express.js

Chapter 3

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Evolution of a Node.js API, Zoe.js — API

Chapter 4

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Evolution of a Node.js API, Zoe.js — MongoDB

Chapter 5

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