Defining a Setter

As their name implies, in a Joystick app, setters are the part of our API responsible for setting data. Setters can set data on any data source (e.g., a third-party API or a static file), though, typically your data source will be one of the databases you've connected to your app.

As an example, we're going to wire up a setter that updates the test data we created earlier via our fixture. In the /api/books folder we created in the previous lesson, we want to create another file setters.js:

const setters = {
  update_book: {
    input: {
      book_id: {
        type: 'string',
        required: true,
      },
      title: {
        type: 'string',
        required: true,
      },
      author: {
        type: 'string',
        required: true,
      },
    },
    set: (input = {}) => {
      return process.databases.mongodb.collection('books').updateOne(
        { _id: input.book_id },
        {
          $set: {
            title: input.title,
            author: input.author,
          }
        }
      );

      /* PostgreSQL
         return process.databases.postgresql.query(`
           UPDATE books
           SET title = $1, author = $2
           WHERE book_id = $3
         `, [
           input.title,
           input.author,
           input.book_id,
         ]);
      */
    },
  },
};

export default setters;

Above, we're following a nearly-identical structure to the getter that we defined in the previous lesson. Here, we've introduced something new, though. With a setter, we're anticipating user input from the client (browser). While we could just blindly hand that input off to our database, it's wise to do some validation on what we've received.

Here, we've added an input field which allows us to define a schema for the input data we receive from the client. When a request is made for this setter update_book, before any code runs, the user's input will be validated against the input schema we've defined here.

Once it passes, to define the behavior for our setter, we add a method to our setter object set() which, similar to our getter, runs arbitrary code to "set" or update a data source. Here, we're running an update via MongoDB (with a PostgreSQL example commented out below) to change the title and author of the book matching the input.book_id value to whatever we've been passed from the client.

Because we've already validated that the data we've received for each field has a type of string and exists, we can safely pass it off to our database.

Before we can put this to use, we have one more step: registering our API.