mgonza63 / only-once

Check out ReadMe. The 'Gooseless' branch doesn't use mongoose, just MongoDB.

Only once message

This is an app that allows users to send a link with a message once the message is revealed, the link won't work anymore.

Tools Used

• Node.js
• Express
• MongoDB
• EJS
• Railway

Notes

I found an interesting problem after deploying and testing this project. At first, I had the one time message appear right when the GET request was made having the findByIdAndDelete() was perfect for this since I want the message to be read once and then removed from the database.

app.get("/:id", async (req, res) => {
  try {
  const message = await Message.findByIdAndDelete(req.params.id).exec();
  } catch (error) {
    console.log(error);
  }
});

This is the code I had and it worked perfectly, but whenever I sent the link to a friend, the message object would disappear from my database. Then, I realized most message apps make a GET request to add the meta data (title, description, image, etc.). And this is why I had to change the code so that the user has to click a button to reveal the message, making a different request and then I can go ahead and delete it from the database.

TODO's

• Loading states
• error handling
• copy to clipboard
• hashing
• maybe use other type of uuid to prevent people of guessing a random url string and get a message