The idea is to create a user, on the post /users route, which returns a user id. Assuming two users have created/registered themselves, you can then call get /users to retrieve a list of all registered users (names and ids). You can then use those ids to create messages between users, /post messages with the receiver_id, sender_id, and contents in the body. Finally, you can use the get /messages/users/:usersId1/users/:userId2 to get all the messages sent between those users.
The catch all route serves up the swagger json documentation. You can copy this json and paste it in http://editor.swagger.io/#/ (File => Past JSON => import) and see a beautiful easy to read api documentation.
Assuming you have an instance of postgresql locally and have it running, you can run the
local-db-create.sh script.
To run the tests, the app must be running, $ npm start && npm run test.
When deploying to Heroku, make sure the db is setup. You can run a quick one off task
which will run the schema.
$ heroku run npm run load:schema
I ended up choosing postgresql as the db of choice, mainly b/c I know it is supported on heroku with node applications.
| user |
|---|
| id (uuid) |
| name (text) |
| message |
|---|
| id (uuid) |
| contents (text) |
| date_sent (timestamp) |
| sender_id (uuid) |
| receiver_id (uuid) |
This very simply illustrates that every message has a sending user and receiving user, with the assumption that messages are only intended to be viewed between to users. To scale this for messages to be consumed between multiple users, I would have to consider adding a third table of perhaps chat_room, which then arises a user_chat_room many to many table in which we connect which users are subscribed to which rooms.