Back End Development and APIs Projects - Exercise Tracker - Bad form naming practices

[autiomni]

This is not so much asking or help as it is pointing out an error in your code.

You have the HTML form name of “exercise-form” with an input name as “:_id” which is probably just copy and pasted from the parameter url. You can’t access this from req.body.:_id because ‘:’ will throw an error. It’s something that may confuse people when they can access it from req.body and took me a few minutes of trial and error to figure out. Unless you meant for this to be an issue to teach us quality assurance practices.

Cheers

[autiomni]

It’s this form in the index.html of the exercise

as you can see the id input name is ‘:_id’ which throws an error if you try to get it from req.body

<form id="exercise-form" method="post">
>         <h3>Add exercises</h3>
>         <p><code>POST /api/users/:_id/exercises</code></p>
>         <input id="uid" type="text" name=":_id" placeholder=":_id" />
>         <input id="desc" type="text" name="description" placeholder="description*" />
>         <input id="dur" type="text" name="duration" placeholder="duration* (mins.)" />
>         <input id="date" type="text" name="date" placeholder="date (yyyy-mm-dd)" />
>         <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
>       </form> here

[lasjorg]

It is an odd value but you can still get it from the body if you use the value as a string.

console.log('req.body', req.body[':_id'])

But the test doesn’t use the form so you get it from param

console.log('req.params', req.params['_id'])

I’m guessing the name might have been chosen to look like the param value.