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Welcome back. Let's try and get this 'post' request to work, that we couldn't get in the previous video.

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Now in order for us to test something more than just GET, well we can use the Terminal but there's a

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really nice tool that allows us to make these requests to a server and see what we get back.

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And it's called Postman.

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If you go to www.getpostman.com it is one of the best tools if you're ever working

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with a server.

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It's free and you can download it for your operating system.

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Just simply click on whichever one you want.

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Sign up and once it's loaded then you can open it up and you'll have something like this.

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And don't worry it's very very simple to use.

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We simply have here the requests that we want to get.

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And you'll see a few that you've never seen before and don't worry about them.

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These are very very rarely used.

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We see the ones that we care about DELETE, PUT, POST, GET right there

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and you simply enter the URL that you want to have this running on.

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So in our example let's do 'npm start' again.

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And while the server is running let's just go to '/profile'.

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And then in here we want to say 'localhost:3000' – that's the port that we gave it – and we'll say

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'/profile'

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So we want to do a GET request over here.

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If I click send I get 'getting profile'. It gives me the Headers and the Body, which is great, but now because

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we have this tool we can also do a POST request.

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So let's say that we are no longer sending the 'user'.

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We want to send a response [res].

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And from this response we want to return whatever user that we submit to '/profile'.

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So let's start off here, first.

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We're going to change this to a POST and with a POST

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remember that we can actually add things to the body and you see over here that there's a couple of

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options: 'form-data' the 'x-www-form-urlencoded' we have 'raw' and then 'binary'. 

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Now don't let this scare you.

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These two are forms through HTML.

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If you usually do an HTML form tag and do a GET or a POST request you can just click on this and you

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can see here 'Key Value' so I can say name equals 'andrei'.

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And now when I send this I get 'Sally' and 'soccer' well because well I haven't saved this yet let's

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go back to what we had before and send that again we see that the POST request is working.

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And if I want to access this information I simply do

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'(req.body)'

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But let's see if this works.

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If I click send

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Hmm I get 'undefined' and that is because Express only gives you a little bit.

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You still need a few packages if you want this to work.

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If you ever want to access '(req.body)' well you need to use a middleware and the middleware that

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we want is called body-parser and you'll use it and most Express servers, so you'll just get used

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to it.

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It's 'npm install body-parser'.

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And now this body-parser what it's going to do is it's going to grab whatever information we receive

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and parse it just like JSON or forms into something that we can use. In order to actually use it

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well, we know how middleware works, we simply at the top say 'app.use()'

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and body-parser it will come with a 'bodyParser' that we'll just require with the package that we just

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installed.

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In 'app.use()' we simply do 

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'bodyParser.urlencoded'

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Which is how we're able to get this ['x-www-form-urlencoded'].

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And we just have to pass it a parameter: {extended: false}.

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Let's try that again.

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I'm going to save

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we'll do 'npm start' if we go back and send again.

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We see that.

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There you go it's working.

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{name: 'andrei'} because we've sent our 'Key Value' with form data.

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So if you're building a server for a form that gets submitted you'll use this.

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But as you know there's also JSON that we can use and the way we use JSON is we click on 'raw' and

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in here we can send whichever things we want; in our case it's going to be JSON, and with JSON we can

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now say what we want to send, and if we ever do any wrong syntax, it'll tell us that this is wrong JSON.

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But let's just say for the '/profile' I want to add a new user and this user will be called – remember

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double quotes here – we'll have "user" and this user will be called "Jenny"

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and "Jenny" will have a hobby of "tennis"

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Everything looks fine.

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That's JSON. If I now send this

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I get an empty object. Again because we've only told it to parse 'urlencoded' body-parser needs

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to also know about JSON. Again in order to do that we say 'app.use(bodyParser.json())'

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If we save that

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and send again - look at that - we have { user: 'Jenny', hobby: 'tennis' }.

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So now we can add that user by maybe adding it to our database and then sending a response 'Success'

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Let's try that again.

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We get a response 'Success' that we've posted "Jenny" "tennis" in this way we can also do PUT, which is very

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similar we just send the data but PUT is used for updating if we want to update perhaps Jenny to have

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a different hobby and DELETE to delete maybe that user, something that we'll get into in the next video.

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But as you can see Postman is great.

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It's a great way to test out your server before you connect it to your front-end, something that we'll

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definitely do in this course in our final project.

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Very cool.

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I'll see you in the next one.

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Bye-bye.