[ STUCK ] Back End Development and APIs Projects: Exercise Tracker

Backend Development
1

Hello :slight_smile:

I am just starting the certification project and cannot get past the first bit.

The first test/task is "You can POST to /api/users with form data username to create a new user."

Pretty straightforward. I added the code below (between comments) but I just cannot get a value out of req.body.username.

My code:

const express = require('express')
const app = express()
const cors = require('cors')
require('dotenv').config()

app.use(cors())
app.use(express.static('public'))
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.sendFile(__dirname + '/views/index.html')
});

//  MY CODE     ---------------------------------
app.post("/api/users", async (req, res) => {
  let username = req.body.username;   // <<--the culprit
  
  if (username === ""){
    res.json({error: "please enter a user name"})
  }

console.log(username);
  res.json(username)
});

//  MY CODE     ---------------------------------

const listener = app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, () => {
  console.log('Your app is listening on port ' + listener.address().port)
})

The resulting error message:

/workspace/boilerplate-project-exercisetracker/index.js:14
  let username = req.body.username;   // <<--the culprit
                          ^

TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'username')

I have tried req.body and req.body.username … I even tried req.params and req.params.username out of desparation but nothing!

The relevant HTML form:

<form action="/api/users" method="post">
        <h2>Create a New User</h2>
        <p><code>POST /api/users</code></p>
        <input id="uname" type="text" name="username" placeholder="username" />
        <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
      </form>

I’m either missing something dreadfully obvious or maybe there’s something wrong with the test setup?

2

Looks like you are missing the bodyparser middleware. You’ll need that anytime you are getting data out of these forms which send data in the body

1 Like
3

@pkdvalis thank you! you are correct.
I ended up using multer instead of body-parser but you helped me get unstuck.

:pray:

1 Like