Angular-Make-Useful-APIs.md

Make Useful APIs in AngularJS

There are two more things you have to do before this to be useful to you, however. Say you want to show all the things associated with the username requested with that page: you must first

1. Have a "username" or "owner" field in your thing schema at /server/api/thing/thing.model.js
2. Write a custom route in /server/api/thing/index.js to catch a request for a specific username. The request from your frontend might look something like:

$http.get('/api/things/' + username).success( … )

so you'll add a line into your index.js like:

router.get('/:user', controller.indexUser);

and then in thing.controller.js you'll write an exports.indexUser function like so:

exports.indexUser = function(req, res) {
    Thing.find({owner:req.params.user}, function (err, things) {
        if(err) return res.send(500, err);
        res.json(200, things);
    });
};

Warning!!! this method only works right if usernames are absolutely unique between users. The default authentication system that comes with the angular-fullstack generator does not have unique usernames, so you're probably better off using the _user.id field to determine unique users in your database for now, unless you want to implement unique user names yourself by altering your /api/user/user.model.js, /api/user/user.controller.js, and your /app/client/account/signup/signup.controller.js. Thankfully, you should know how to go about doing all that after reading this guide!

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