Timestamp Microservice - empty date parameter not passing

Curriculum Help
1

This is the last test I need to pass, I’m not sure what the issue might be.

My code:

app.get("/api/:date", (req, res) => {
  let date = req.params.date
  if (!date) {
    date = new Date()
    let unix = date.toUTCString()
    let utc = date.getTime()
    res.send({unix, utc})
  } else {
    let unix = Number(date) ? +date : new Date(date).getTime()
    let utc = new Date(unix).toUTCString()
    if (unix) {
    res.send({unix, utc})
    } else {
    res.send({ error : "Invalid Date" })
  }
  }
})

Replit link https://replit.com/@Montinyek/boilerplate-project-timestamp#index.js
Challenge link https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/back-end-development-and-apis/back-end-development-and-apis-projects/timestamp-microservice

2

You’ve used !date to try to handle an empty date parameter.
A call to /api/:date by definition has a date parameter (i.e. this call will only be made if a date parameter is supplied by the user).

So, in the absence of a date parameter, what are you left with?

You also have the values for unix and utc back-to-front inside that conditional statement.

3

Thank you, I changed the conditional statement to this

if (!date || date === '') {
    date = new Date()
    let unix = date.getTime() 
    let utc = date.toUTCString()
    res.send({unix, utc})
  }

Looks like I’m still not getting it. When I try to test this statement, I just leave out the date portion in the link and get Cannot GET /api/. I think I have the wrong idea about what an empty date parameter means.

4

If a call is made to /api/:date, it’s because the user has supplied a value after /api/ which can be collected to populate req.params.date. If no value is supplied by the user, what api call is made?

5

In this post the condition if (req.params.date === '' || req.params.date === undefined) apparently worked. Why is that?

6

I solved it by creating a separate app.get() function like so

app.get("/api/", (req, res) => {
    let date = new Date()
    let unix = date.getTime() 
    let utc = date.toUTCString()
    res.send({unix, utc})
})

But I still don’t understand why my solution didn’t work, since a similar one in the post above did.

7

Ah yes, if you suffix the parameter with a ? it makes it optional, so you could make your code work that way.

Basically, there are two approaches:

  1. Make the call to /api/:date?. Making the parameter optional means that you can handle a !date condition inside this GET request. If you omit the ?, this route will not be called in the event that a parameter is not supplied.
  2. Keep it as /api/:date and make a separate call to /api, to handle no parameter.

So I guess you can make your code work simply by adding that one character, now that you’ve switched your values around.

EDIT: I see you’ve gone for option 2 (before I wrote this reply), but if you comment out that /api GET request and just add a ? to your other GET request, you’ll see that you pass that way too.

8

Thanks, that clears it up.