tdoran / PaGiToNi

Server API Call Project

Team PaGiToNi has built a site that allows you to view the latest news from a variety of reputable news sources, and search for news relating to issues of your choice 👍

Completed Key objectives 🏄‍🏄‍🏄‍🏄‍

• Use at least 1 API
• Make your API calls from the back-end using the Request module (or one you build yourself)
• The server contains a minimum of 2 routes
• Back-end testing with Tape
• Server testing with Supertest to inject fake HTTP requests
• Project hosted on Heroku
• Using module.exports and require to break a single large server file into smaller modules.
• Employ continuous intergration on your project with Travis or a similar tool (not currently passing..)

Stretch goals still to complete 🙆‍

• Allow users to search via categories, countries, sources etc.
• Allow users to scroll across pages to view more than the set amount of news articles

Our journey 🚗

Day One (Tuesday)

• We used a whiteboard to draw up a basic software architecture
• We decided on our priorities for this project, namely: a clearly structured, documented API to allow us to focus on back-end requests
• We mob-programmed the initial setup

Day Two (Wednesday)

• Splitting into pairs👯‍, we started with:

  1. the first API call and its handler
  2. the xhr to reach the first API's route and handler

• Reconvening to plan our next steps, we decided on:

  1. beginning work on the second, user-input API call
  2. prepping the front-end to render the response from the first xhr and API

Biggest challenge: Mocking API calls

• We attempted to test our back-end handlers using nock to mock an external API call. After struggling with it for several hours, we ultimately couldn't get it to work. 😭

Resources

• News API: https://newsapi.org
• Loading spinner : http://tobiasahlin.com/spinkit/

Our initial software architecture plan: