I am playing around with Nodejs and express by building a small rest API. My question is, what is the good practice/best way to set the code status, as well as the response data?
Let me explain with a little bit of code (I will not put the node and express code necessary to start the server, just the router methods that are concerned):
router.get('/users/:id', function(req, res, next) { var user = users.getUserById(req.params.id); res.json(user);});exports.getUserById = function(id) { for (var i = 0; i < users.length; i++) { if (users[i].id == id) return users[i]; }};The code below works perfectly, and when sending a request with Postman, I get the following result:
As you can see, the status shows 200, which is OK. But is this the best way to do this? Is there a case where I should have to set the status myself, as well as the returned JSON? Or is that always handled by express?
For example, I just made a quick test and slightly modified the get method above:
router.get('/users/:id', function(req, res, next) { var user = users.getUserById(req.params.id); if (user == null || user == 'undefined') { res.status(404); } res.json(user);});As you can see, if the user is not found in the array, I will just set a status of 404.
Resources/advices to learn more about this topic are more than welcome.